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V 



^ ,, SPEECHES AND ADDRESSES 



OF THE LATE 



HON. DAVID S. CODDINGTON, 



"WITH A 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



NEW YORK: 

D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 443 & 445 Broadway, 

1866. 



■1 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1&60, by 

J. CODDINGTOiSr, 

In tlie Clerk's Office of the District* Court of the United States for the Suulhera 
District of New York. 



John F. Tf.ow & Co., 

PniNTERS, STEEEOTTPERS, AND ELECTROTTPERS, 

50 Greene Street, New York. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Biographical Sketch v. 

1. The Burns Centennial Festival — Speech delivered at Mozart Hall, 

New York, 1859 1 

2. Fourth of July Oration, delivered at Monticello, Va., at the toml) 

of Jefferson, in 1859 9 

3. The Great Meeting in Union Square, K Y. — Speech delivered April 

20th, 1861 37 

4. War Meeting in Union Square — Speech delivered in July, 1862. ... 45 

5. The Military and Financial Policy of the Xatioual Government — 

Speech in the Legislature at Albany, delivered Jan. 23d, 1862. ... 49 

6. War Meeting in Madison Square — Speech delivered April 20th, 1863. 65 

7. Meeting of the War Democracy — Speech delivered at Cooper Insti- 

tute on the Presidential Crisis, Nov. 1, 1864 1o 

8. Eulogy on Abraham Lincoln, delivered at Charleston, South Caro- 

lina, May 6th, 1865 93 

9. Address on the death of Edward Everett, written for the Soldier's 

Friend, a newspaper in New York 127 

10. Letter to Abraham Lincoln, March 4th, 1865, written at request 

of the workingmen of New York on his inauguration 133 

11. The Presidential Campaign of 1848 — Speech delivered before the 

Freesoil League in New York, Nov. 1848 141 

12. Fourth of July Oration, 1845, delivered at Bergen Point, N. J., at 

the Ladies' Fair 163 



BIOGRAPHY OF DAVID S. CODDINGTOK 



David Smith CoDDUsraToisr, the autTior of tlie 
sj)eeclies contained in this volume, was born in the 
city of New York on September 23d, 1823. He 
was the third son of the late Jonathan I. Codding- 
ton, a prominent merchant of New York, and a 
lineal descendant of one of the oldest families of the 
country. 

The family traces its lineage clearly back to the 
days of the American Colonies. William Codcling- 
toD, the founder of the family on this continent, came 
to America in 1630, having been appointed by King 
Charles I. of England a magistrate for the colony 
of Massachusetts, a position which he filled for 
several years. On the accession of Gov. Winthrop 
to the Governorship of the colony, Mr. Coddingtou, 
disagreeing with him in his policy, to avoid the 
persecution with w^hich Winthrop pursued his polit- 
ical enemies, emigrated with others to wdiat was 
then called the island of Aquetneck, but by Judge 
Coddinsrton named Ehode Island. Here he founded 



vi BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

V 

a colony for whicli lie framed a government and a 
code of laws, and was elected Judge, but in 1640, 
the form of government was changed, and the 
founder and Judge of the colony was elected its first 
Governor. He held the office for many years, — we 
believe, until 1675. He has come down to us in 
history as a prudent, active Quaker, zealous for his 
principles and earnest in his advocacy of the liberty 
of conscience. 

Jonathan I. Coddington, the father of the sub- 
ject of this sketch, was also a leader among his 
people ; and at one time held an influential position 
in this city as a Democratic politican. His career 
as such was at a time in the history of the Demo- 
cratic party of great interest, and he may be said to 
have been a representative man of the Jacksonian 
Democracy of his day, as his sou was of the war 
Democracy as it now exists. Long before General 
Jackson had be2:un his crusade ao;ainst the United 
States Bank, the Senior Coddington had given ex- 
pression to views upon the question of Paper-Cur- 
rency and its tendency to dangerous expansion 
totally at variance with those of a great majority of 
his fellow-merchants and politicians, and in conson- 
ance with those of the President ; so that when the 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Vll 

latter developed his " hard money theory " he looked 
to Mr. Coddinofton as one of his most ardent and 
active supporters, appointed him Postmaster of the 
city of New York, and virtually placed the devel- 
opment of his policy here under Mr. Coddington's 
direction. In suj)port of Jackson's policy Mr. Cod- 
dington became associated with Silas Wright, John 
A. Dix, William L. Marcy and others, and was 
equally energetic with them in defending that admini- 
stration a2:ainst the execrations of the sufferers 
from paper money and in upholding the then much 
ridiculed sub-treasury system. He was also very 
active as a politician during the memorable era of 
Van Buren's administration ; and a leading spirit 
among the Democrats during that period of political 
disaster. The political strife which ended in the 
wonderful uprising of the people in the election of 
General Harrison in 1840, began during the admini- 
stration of General Jackson, and vras continued with 
great bitterness through that of Mr. Van Buren. It 
will be remembered as one of remarkable excitement. 
The whole country was plunged into violent dis- 
cussion, and partisan feeling extended to all profes- 
sions and^trades and conditions of life, high and low. 
The oldest and the youngest of the family, — men, 



Vm BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

women and cliildren, had perforce to become eitiier 
" Jacksonian " or " Federal "— " infernal whig " or 
" rascally tory." The amenities of social intercourse 
were often forgotten in the excitement of the 
absorbing mania. Politics boldly intruded into the 
church, and often a pastor's success depended more 
upon his political opinions than his religious belief 
or pastoral or oratorical ability. The financial 
distress of 1837, which followed the inauguration 
of President Jackson's policy, the unrelenting bear- 
ing of the administration towards its opponents, the 
strictly partisan distribution of the public patron- 
ages, and other measures calculated to incite and 
strengthen opposition, resulted in the great defeat of 
the Democracy in 1840. It was in the midst of this 
great political excitement and revolution that the 
father, growing disgusted with national politics, re- 
tired to the quiet of private life, or indulged only in 
local politics, and the son first displayed his taste 
for political pursuits, though too young to begin the 
life of a politician. 

Daatd S. Coddington was then a boy of seven- 
teen, but particularly precocious, and he constantly 
evinced an eager desire to attain a thorough knowl- 
edge of the principles of the party with which his 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, 



father had so long acted. He was at this time just 
from school, where he had won a brilliant rej^utatiou 
as a quick scholar, though, while a student, he was 
more famed for the readiness with which he acquired 
knowledge and the recklessness with which he defied 
school discipline than for serious application and dili- 
gent scholarship. He was possessed of a ready faculty 
for acquiring information without severe study ; and 
was indeed too delicate in frame for close applica- 
tion, though at the same time so full of a certain 
vitality and energy that existed rather in his brain 
than blood, that he could not bring himself to yield 
readily to the rigid system of a school. He had 
originally studied at New Utrecht and New Bruns- 
wick, but in 1837, when only fourteen years of age, he 
had entered the Freshman class at Columbia Collesfe. 
A year subsequently, he entered Union College as a 
Sophomore, and remained there two years. He did 
not carry off all the honors, but yielded the more 
solid ones to more persevering, but less brilliant com- 
petitors, while he contented himself with the prize 
for elocution, and with leaving behind him the remem- 
brance of many a witty saying and reckless deed of 
daring as his legacy to the traditions of the Col- 
lege. 



3: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

Young Coddiugton evinced while at Union 
College a remarkable talent for elocution and a 
force and readiness in extern j)oraneou3 discussion 
■whicli indicated that in such occupation the energy 
of his character found a congenial pursuit. Possess- 
ing this taste, the selection of the legal profession 
was natural enough, and he entered with George 
W. Strong, Esq., an eminent lawyer of the old 
school, in whose office many prominent men now in 
practice have been students. In this office, and 
afterwards in that of Slosscn and Schell, likewise a 
famed resort for aspirants to the bar, Mr. Codding- 
ton completed his legal education, varying the 
monotony of professional study by an occasional 
votive offering to the muses, or contributing an 
article for the press, and at all times indulging in an 
epigrammatic humor which caused him to take a 
ludicrous view, not unmixed with satire, of life, its 
surroundings, and pursuits, and sometimes of his 
friends, but oftener of himself. 

In the year 1845, and at the age of twenty-one, 
Mr. Coddington was admitted to the bar. Having 
but a feeble constitution, and without the incentive 
of necessity, he never engaged earnestly in the 
practice of his profession, but shrank from contact 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH/ XI 

witli the roiiglier experience of a practising lawyer, 
preferring to devote himself to the more congenial 
pursuits of literature and politics, with a view to 
giving his attention when occasion should offer to 
public affairs. 

For some years no such opportunity as he desired 
offered itself, and after the signal defeat of the 
Democrats in 1840, until the convention of 1848, 
Mr. Coddingtou remained quiet and secluded, pur- 
suing with great ardor his studies as a lawyer, and 
fitting himself for public speaking. On two or 
three occasions during these eight years, he delivered 
public orations, but generally on subjects disconnect- 
ed with politics ; but in which he displayed the 
same forcible epigrammatic style which subsequently 
so distinguished him as an orator. On July 4th, 
1845, he delivered a patriotic address at a Fair at 
Bergen Point, New Jersey. This early effort was 
characterized by great originality of tl^ought, and 
that fervent patriotism which in later years found 
larger scope, and he is said to have held his hearers 
fixed with a closer attention than is ordinary on such 
occasions. 

The Presidential canvass of 1848 profoundly 
attracted the attention of Mr. Coddington. The 



Xll BIOGEAPHICAL SKETCH. 

\ 

name of Martin VanBuren, the friend of his father, 
was again brought forward as a candidate for the 
Presidency. Defeated in 1840, by the Hardcider 
and Tippecanoe enthusiasts at the ballot-boxes, and 
in 1844 in the convention by the machinations of 
Calhoun, Van Buren's friends hoped that at least in 
1848 the people would have an opportunity to pass 
upon the merits of his previous administration, and 
if they approved of it, to reelect him to the Presi- 
dency. Though every consideration of justice 
seemed to entitle him to this recompense for what 
he had suffered for the party, Mr. Van Buren was 
again deprived of the nomination. When the free 
soil nomination at Utica, on June 2 2d, was made, 
and which was reluctantly accepted by Martin Van 
Buren, Mr. Coddington threw his whole soul into 
the movement, and did all that was in his power to 
render it effective. He fully approved the senti- 
ments of the platform of the Free Soil Democracy 
in opposition to Slavery. His maiden political 
speech in that campaign was considered an evidence 
of his superior qualifications as a public speaker, and 
of great promise as a politician. Foreseeing the 
determination of the leaders to make the slavery 
question the test, and to proscribe henceforth every 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Xlll 

man who was not wholly committed to the false 
policy of its extension, he took a firm position in 
opj^osition to that pliant faction of the Democracy 
at the North which yielded everything to the South. 
He was anxious to have the ris^hts of the South 
protected by every suitable guarantee, and as long 
as the Missouri Compromise was in force to strictly 
observe the conditions of that ancient compact. No 
admirer of slavery, yet never a political abolitionist, 
it was only when he became satisfied that without 
freedom to all, the Union could not exist, was he in 
favor of the destruction of slavery. He made no 
claim to being actuated by philanthropic impulses 
in favor of those abeady slaves, but acted from 
convictions of his duty to the freemen of the North. 
He charged that abolitionism was not the cause of 
the late rebellion, but that in the history of the 
platforms, and of the men placed in power by the 
Democratic party from 1844 to 1860, could be 
found material enough to indicate how the flames 
of discontent were fanned into the fire of rebellion 
which precipitated the great crisis of 1861 upon the 
country. He dated the commencement of the civil 
war not to the firing on Fort Sumter, but to the 
manipulations of the Kansas Question by Mr. Pierce 



XIV BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, 

and Mr. Buchanan and their advisers, and believed 
that the "blood s|)illed in that territory was the 
opening sacrifice in the great struggle. A Demo- 
crat by birth and by conviction, with nothing in 
common with abolitionism until the existence of the 
government was assailed, and then still a Democrat, 
l3ut subordinating party obligation to his duty to 
the country, choosing rather to support an admini- 
stration he had no hand in placing in power to the 
greater evils of anarchy and disunion, he was willing 
to act with any party which was earnest in restor- 
ing the integrity of the Union, obedience to its laws 
and respect for its flag. 

The camj)aign of 1848 resulted in the defeat of 
the Democrats. The vote of that party in the State 
of New York was divided between Van Buren and 
Cass, and hence the Whigs carried the State for 
General Taylor. The Free Soil Democrats were 
henceforth out of the pale of the party, and might 
never more hope to be taken back again. After 
this campaign, Mr. Coddingtou as a Freesoiler could 
not expect to be considered as any longer available 
as a politician in the ranks of the Democratic party, 
the majority of w^hich had followed the beck of 
Calhoun, and the leadership of Cass, leaving the 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XV 



Freesoilers in a hopeless minority. Mr. Codclington 
was temporarily proscribed in common with all the 
principal Freesoilers, and with them was left hy the 
Democratic leaders to enjoy several years of retire- 
ment ; much of which he devoted to reading and to 
study. This course of study only served to 
strengthen the political convictions which he had 
inherited from his father, and the correctness of 
which his own experience had confirmed. Mean- 
time, he satisfied himself with proclaiming in 1859 
his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution and 
scheme ; and interested himself by frequent addresses 
to the people in patriotic orations, but he seldom 
touched upon partisan subjects. Among the most 
interesting of these efforts was his address, published 
elsewhere, at the Burns Centennial Festival of IS 59, 
in New York. This address was said by prominent 
Journals at the time to have been most powerful 
and beautiful, and is described by them as the 
" feature of the day." It was a brilliant and 
scholarly effort, showing a most intimate knowledge 
of the writings of the Poet, abounding in incident, 
anecdote and metaphor, and so excited the enthu- 
siasm of his Celtic auditors that they greeted him 
with rounds of applause more enthusiastic than those 



5vi BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

by wLicli orators are generally rewarded even at a 
festive gathering. Another of Mr. Coddington's 
most interesting efforts was delivered on the fourth 
of July, 1859, being an oration at the grave of 
Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, Virginia. This 
oration, which is also published in full in this 
volume, was delivered when the excitement which 
preceded the Presidential elections of 1860 had 
already begun to be felt in Virginia ; and the speaker 
took care to express how foreign and repulsive to 
him was the idea of national estrangement, and how 
kindly were the sentiments then as now entertained 
by the people of the Empire State, and the North 
generally, for those of the old Dominion. These 
efforts did not serve, however, to bring him prom- 
inently forward in public life, did not particularly 
endear him to the public heart, as he was destined 
to become. It was not until his party, amidst the 
excitement of April, 1861, became the great War 
Democracy that he again appeared in politics. 
Then ]\Ir. Coddington, born a Jackson Democrat, 
reared in the faith of Van Buren, successively a 
Freesoil Democrat in 1848, and an anti-Lecompton 
Democrat in 1859, adhering to his life-long princi- 
ples and his party, proclaimed himself, before the 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XVU 

echoes of the guns of Sumter had died away, as an 
out and out war Democrat. 

When the Southern States were precipitated into 
armed resistance to the Government by designing 
politicians, and the thunder of cannon against 
Fort Sumter woke the slumbering North to the 
reality of long-threatened disunion, the people found 
themselves miarmed and unprepared for the mighty 
struggle for national existence which was upon 
them. Their leaders had slumbered or betrayed 
their trust — no man seemed equal to acting in this 
great emergency, and the capitol was cut off *from 
communications with the greater portion of the 
country. Early in April, 1861, the people assembled « 
in overwhelming masses in Union Square to take 
counsel together, and discuss this terrible calamity, 
and to endeavor to disentangle themselves from the 
meshes of the network of conspiracy in which they 
had become involved. This was the moment in the 
life of David S. Coddington in which his prompt 
action in the limited field which was open to him, 
will tend most to make his memory dear to those 
who knew him. An old-school Democrat, for years 
in oj^position to the party which had just obtained 

the power, and which had within a few days past 

2 



XVm BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

become responsible for tlie administration of the 
government, tliere was no reason why as a politician 
lie should become a leader in their councils. Policy 
would have dictated to a less patriotic opponent, as 
it did indeed to many of his party, to leave the 
Republicans to act for themselves, and await the 
opportunities to take advantage of their errors. 
But Mr. Coddins^ton did not hesitate a moment in 
throwing himself heartily and zealously in support 
of an administration which at the ballot-box he had 
opposed, but which now identified itself with the 
life of the nation, and boldly and openly joined 
hands with it as a northern war democrat in opposi- 
tion to the democracy of the South who had taken 
up arms for the nation's overthrow. On the 19th 
of April, in a masterly appeal to the people to rouse 
up and exert themselves for the preservation of the 
Union, he astonished even those who knew him best 
by his singularly classic and eloquent remarks, 
abounding in condensed sarcasm and in originality 
and terseness of thought. He had plead at the tomb 
of Jefferson for the perpetuation by arts of peace of 
a Union which its inmate had done so much to 
create ; now he argued for the preservation by force 
of arms of that Union assailed by the countrymen 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XIX 

of JeffersoD, and tlireatened to be rent asunder by 
tlie appliances of war. 

The course of Mr. Coddiugton as a war democrat 
was consistent and active to the last. He aided in 
every way to bring the struggle to a successful con- 
clusion, and though mindful of the frequent mistalies 
of the party in power, regarded them as secondary 
to the great object of preserving the integrity of 
the nation. Had his physical organization equalled 
his moral courage and patriotism, he would have 
been among the first to take the field in a cause in 
whose success his whole soul was enlisted. 

In the fall of 1861, Mr. Coddington was elected 
on the Democratic ticket a member of the State 
Assembly from the city of New York. Although 
nominated as a partisan, he was largely supported 
by good men of all parties. He devoted himself 
with untiring industry to the interest of the city, 
and worked with a zeal and energy little in accord- 
ance with his former inactive life as a student, faith- 
fully discharging his duties both as a member in the 
House, and of important committees. He at once 
took position as a skilful and able debater, and 
when he spoke, he commanded that attention which 
in large deliberative bodies is the highest evidence 



XX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

of tlie appreciation of the speaker by his col- 
leas:ues. 

As a representative in tlie State Legislature his 
most effective speech was delivered on a resolution 
introduced for the purpose of requesting the Gen- 
eral Government to accelerate the movements of the 
army. While sketching the progress of events, and 
holding up to ridicule the cry of impatient home- 
guards men and tacticians of the " on to Richmond " 
school, he displayed his sympathies for the cause of 
the country, and his confidence in its triumph, by re- 
marks which called forth the highest commendations 
of the Press, the vigorous applause of the galleries, 
and the congratulations of the members. The New 
York Times said of this S2:)eech : 

" Its aim was to discourage public impatience and inspire 
confidence in the national authorities who have the matter in 
chai'ge. It Avas eminently the production of a scholar, clear 
forcible and compact in style, and marked with great justness 
of thought and vigor of expression." 

An Albany paper said : 

" Everybody expected a briUiant disj^lay, and nobody was 
disappointed ; Mr. Coddington made a splendid speech ap- 
proving the course of the government, and in favor of stand- 
ing by the Union. There was an intensity about his manner 
that fastened the attention of the house." 

The career of Mr. Coddington as a member of 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XXI 

the Legislature, altliougli so liiglily creditable to 
himself and beneficial to the city and State, ended 
with one term ; he did not seek a re-nomination. 

As a citizen, he continued active in his exertions 
for the support of the Government, frequently ad- 
dressing assemblages of his fellow-citizens, and rarely 
omitting an opportunity to aid in the work of 
restoring the Union. When the Presidential nomina- 
tions were made in 1864, Mr. Coddington could not 
find it consistent with his views of Democracy to 
accept the Chicago Platform as the political text 
for one who loved his country. He tersely express- 
ed his opinion of that programme in a letter to the 
committee of the great Union Mass Meeting to be 
held in New York, on the 27th of September, and 
which remarkable document is as follows': 

New York, Tuesday, Sept. 27th, 1864. 

Gentlemen : Youi- invitation to speak to-night is received. 
A severe cold will prevent me. 

But neither cold nor heat can freeze or melt out of this 
country the belief that the Chicago Convention has left a 
Democrat no choice between Jefferson Davis, with all his 
crimes, and Abraham Lincoln, with all his faults. 

The Vallandigham j)latform is merely an attempt of the 
Ptichmoud authorities to run the blockade of Northern ballot- 
boxes, Montgomery Constitution in hand. True, the Union 
flag floats from the first section ; so it does from the Florida 
and Tallahassee, until you get near enough for them to hoist 



XXll BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

the Confederate rag and scuttle the union ship, while we, 
robbed of our comj^asses and stripped of our national consist- 
ency, are to be landed upon some bleak dogma of egotistical 
States' Rights and universal anarchy! 

Call Abraham Lincoln a joker ! Why, the Chicago party 
are trying to make this war the ghastliest joke of the continent 
or the century. Have we gone to school to a million of bay- 
onets and learned nothuig ? Have wo marched a million of 
men a thousand miles to stand still ? Are we spending four 
millions a day merely to buy back the old wrangle about 
Slavery? — to buy back another Brooks's murderous cane; 
another Buchanan's Lecompton crime, greater than all the 
Lincoln lapsus constitutionis ? The Crittenden Amendment 
M'as very well to prevent war ; but are Ave to be fought four 
years, desi^oiled of our means, called foreigners, liunted on 
every sea and shore, and bury five hundred thousand brothers, 
to give them all they asked in the past, and no security for all 
they will demand, on that very account, in the future ? They 
will say : " We plunged you vital deep in debt, we helped you 
to innumerable funerals ; but we never buried a single demand. 
While your armies have advanced, your principles have re- 
treated ; and, so long as your victories only mean concessions 
to us, war has no terrors and peace no shame in Dixie." Will 
the red crisis stand this — will greenbacks support it ? Every 
five-twenty bond is a stump speech for Lincoln ; every dollar 
greenback a campaign tract distributed among a warned and 
consuming community, cautioning them how they trifle with 
the dead and the debt of this war. 

Hoping that the ballot-box will prove the sentry-box of 
the national honor, 

I am, very respectfully, yours, 

DAVH) S. CODDINGTOX. 

General McClellau did not receive the full vote 
of tlie Democracy, for many democrats had the same 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XXlll 

convictions as those expressed by Mr. Codding- 
ton. For the support of a large majority of those 
who did vote for him, McClelLan was indebted to 
his own letter, and not to, but really in despite of, 
the platform on which he was nominated. During 
this campaign in November, 1864, Mr. Coddington 
addressed a great gathering of the war Democracy 
at the Cooper's Institute strongly supporting Mr. 
Lincoln and the prosecution of the war. This 
memorable effort of the orator was pronounced at 
the time to be one of the sharpest, clearest and most 
powerful indictments ever framed against a party 
whose leaders had proven false to its principles 
as well as to the honor and welfare of the country. 
As a- vivid, spirited picture of the Democratic jDarty 

of that time, and its attitude this speech is unequalled. 

*■ 

On the second inauguration of President Lincoln, 
Mr. Coddington prepared a letter to him at the 
request of the working men of the city of New York 
replete with patriotic sentiments. His next effort 
was destined to be the oration in memory of the 
martyred president. 

Soon after the occupation of Charleston by the 
Government, Mr. Coddington visited that city for 
the benefit of his health. While there the news of 



XXiv RIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, 

the assassination of the President was received, and 
at the request of the military authorities and soldiers 
of that Department, he delivered a Eulogy in the 
citadel square church. This oration delivered in 
the cradle of the Rebellion amidst the ruins it had 
caused, in memory of its most illustrious victim was 
the last and greatest of Mr. Coddington's addresses. 
Always of a feeble constitution, with failing health, 
and days already numbered, it will be seen in the 
perusal of this address that the fire of his patriotism 
burned brightly to the last, and that this final effort 
of his original genius is worthy of perpetuation as 
not the least effective shell exploded in the citadel 
of treason. 

On his return to the North in June, 186^, his 
growing reputation as an orator was evidenced by 
the large number of invitations which he received 
to address the people in different parts of the coun- 
try, on the ensuing fourth of July, but his last oration 
Lad been delivered. He seemed to feel that his 
brief period of activity was nearly over ; and declin- 
ing to accept any of the many invitations on account 
of his rapidly failing health, he retired to his 
favorite resort at Saratoga Springs to pass the 
summer. His visit there in 1865 will be remem- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XXV 

bered "by hundreds of the habitues of the place. 
He was unusually lively in his manner despite his 
illness, and brilliant and witty in his conversation 
to a degree which caused many of his friends to fear 
that it was the increased, but flickering brilliancy of 
the dying lamp. This fear was too well founded ; 
and on the morning of September 2d, while at Sara- 
toga, Mr. Coddington very suddenly, but evidently 
not unexpectedly, began to fail, and shortly after 
died calmly, and without a struggle. The news of 
his decease came with painful suddenness to a large 
circle of his friends, and was the subject of general 
notice, and profound expressions of regret on the 
part of the press and the people. 

David S. Coddington was in very many respects 
a remarkable man : and died too soon for the coun- 
try and his own reputation. Nature had enriched 
his mind at the expense of his body. He was one 
of those peculiar persons seldom met with whose 
energy is of the brain not of tne bioocl, and who go 
down to posterity under the distinctive classification 
of " men of genius.'' He was one of those characters 
described by Dryden as : 

"A fiery soul, which, workhig out its Avay, 

Fretted the pigmy Lody to decay 

And o'erinformed the tenement of chiy." 



XXvi BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH." 

Without an ostentatious display of kno;yledge 
received from books, he allowed the ripe fruit which 
he had stored away in his years of study to mingle 
with the experience he had derived from a life not 
passed in viewing all things as golden. A physical 
infirmity with which he had heen afflicted from 
youth had imperceptibly its effect upon his temper- 
ament, and while he was as sensitive as Byron, he 
was not as cynical. Had he possessed the bodily 
vigor to have grappled with the labor, he would 
have won a splendid position in any path of life 
which he misrht have chosen as consfenial, for he 
possessed the mind to grapple with problems of 
every character, and of the deepest intricacy. He 
was a man in whom the intuitive was strongly 
developed ; he was always right in his judgment 
from being right in his principle, and could do no 
wrong, because he so strongly and deeply loved 
truth and justice. His first judgment on great 
questions was his best, because prompted by this 
intuitive love of the rio:ht ; and nothinor could 
reason or lead him away from the convictions 
thus instantaneously formed. His mind was of 
that kind that quickly and clearly perceives the 
salient points of a question, and he was a man who 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XXVll 

as quickly acted uidoii impressions tlius con- 
ceived. 

In private life, lie was remarkable and muck 
appreciated for kis social and conversational powers ; 
and among kis intimate acquaintances, ke skone witk 
more brilliancy tkan ke appeared to tke public. 
He was very quick and brilliant at repartee, easy 
and fluent of language, unusually forcible and ex- 
ceedingly epigrammatic in kis construction of kis 
sentences, and at all times witty ; and tkese qualities 
made kis society muck sougkt after. Few men kave 
been more courted and admired in society tkan Mr. 
Coddington, and few possessed greater qualifications 
for instructing or pleasing a social circle. But ke 
was not merely admired in society ; David S. Cod- 
diugton was loved in kis social circle even more 
tkan ke was admired. A gentle, entkusiastic spirit, 
always earnest and often impetuous in kis eutkusi- 
asm, of great generosity, kindness and affability, 
very tender in kis manner, and affectionate in kis 
disposition, ke drew otkers tov/ards kim in sympatky 
and gentleness, and was even more lovable tkan 
fascinatmg. ' His wit was playful, kad notking of 
tke bitter in its composition, and nob)ody feared wkile 
all laugked at kis satire. His repartee was so good 



XXViii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

humored and so kindly uttered tliat it gave no pain. 
He made himself more frequently than others his 
object of ridicule, and the shafts of his satire spent 
themselves either on himself or such generalities as 
left his companions no opportunity or occasion to 
construe auc^ht offensive in them. With all his 
bodily infirmity, he was still full of fun and frolic, 
and with younger persons and children occasionally 
indulged in playful romps, and innocent games. He 
rarely thought of himself, was disinterested in his 
frequent efforts for others, and the charity and 
generosity of his character were not less noticeable 
than the qualities of his mind. He has left behind 
him many an anecdote, letter, bon mot and pleasan- 
try illustrative of these qualities, many of which 
will be recalled by this allusion to the recollection 
of his friends, but few of which were preserved by 
him. In his younger days he composed a great 
deal of poetry, wrote many little epigrams, sketches 
and letters for publication, and for the persual of 
his friends and acquaintances, but he seldom kept 
copies of them. The methodical was very little 
developed in his temperament, and he was rather 
careless in preserving his papers, so that many of 
them are lost, but what remains to us of his poetic 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XXIX 

and other contributions to tlie press display tlie 
same peculiar vigorous and epigrammatic style whicli 
is so remarkable in' bis speeches herewith pub- 
lished. 

Mr. Coddington's reputation with the general 
public must dej^end on his achievements as an 
orator ; for in this capacity chiefly was he knov/n to 
the people. It. is a little difficult to decide to what 
class his style of oratory belongs, whether to the 
demonstrative, deliberative or argumentative (Jiidi- 
ciaT) of the ancients, or that of the Senate, the bar, 
the pulpit or the platform style of modern oratory. 
His style was very peculiar, and there is no modern 
orator whom he can be said to have imitated, for in 
thought and matter and manner, he was most 
original. He was not argumentative. His speeches 
are wonderfully compact, terse and elegant combina- 
tions of facts hurled at an audience in successive 
explosions of most effective eloquence. His orations 
are grand pyrotechnic displays of eloquence or 
grand artillery bombardments, with solid facts for 
missiles. His lans^uas^e has the effect of the best 
stump oratory and the elegance of the most classic 
Senatorial literature. The most effective stump 
orator of this country, Tom Cor win, did not win 



XXX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

greater triumplis in the Log-cabincainpaign in 1840, 
or more thorouglily arouse tlie enthusiasm of his 
political audience than did Mr. Coddiugton with his 
patriotic audiences of 1861. But the occasional 
elegant flights in which Corwin indulged pervaded 
the whole oration of Mr. Coddington ; and the most 
studied and classical orations of the Senate are not 
superior for beauty of finish. 

Mr. Coddington — as an eminent statesman once 
declared — ought to have been one of the first orators 
of the country. Without a commanding presence, 
he possessed that graceful gesticulation so well 
becoming the orator. He had a clear, well modu- 
lated voice which imparted distinctness to the utter- 
ance of ideas which in terseness and originality, in 
boldness and trenchant sarcasm have rarely been 
surpassed by any public speaker of the day. In 
debate he wielded his facts with great force and 
precision unaccompanied by that studied ornateness ' 
so often characteristic of the student and man of 
letters. 

On the occasion of his great speech in November, 
1864, some criticisms appeared in the daily papers 
of New York which admirably illustrated his style 
of oratory. The Herald^ after alluding to the 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XXXI 



speeches of General Dix, Judge Pierrepont and 
Greneral Sickles^ said, " but tlie gem of the occasion 
was the splendid speech of Mr. Coddington ... we 
have heard nothing from the stump for many years 
superior to his admirable oration. During this 
canvass, there has been no speech that can at all 
compare with it either in matter or manner. Its 
style is terse, vigorous, pungent and epigrammatic. 
Its logic is unexceptionable. Its sharp, attic wit, 
bitter satire and vehement invective are capitally 
relieved by most appropriate poetical imagery and 
by passages of classical eloquence. In contrast with 
this bright, fresh, sparkling, impassioned address 
the labored and elaborate efforts of others appear 
dull and tedious ... we can draw up comparison 
between them and the apt, pithy, telling speech of 
Mr. Coddington, who exhibits many of the qualifica- 
tions of the highest school of oratory. Indeed his 
keen, piercing style and the nervous energy of his 
statements and illustrations remind us of John 
Randolph, while his speech is as brief, comprehen- 
sive and compact as those of Calhoun." The New 
York Times speaking of it says : " Passages of it 
are as full of fervid eloquence as anything in the 
speeches of Rufus Choate, who was the greatest 



XXXn BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

V 

master this country has ever seen of his rich and 
peculiar style of oratory." 

Had David S. Coddiugton possessed more robust 
health, he would have taken a position in the first 
rank of statesmen. He possessed a clear head, a 
keen wit and a silvery voice wherewith to impart 
his vivid conceptions to his hearers, with great 
culture and application, and a fund of varied know- 
ledge and information, which readily supplied 
material for argument or illustration. As a lawyer 
he would probably have gained with little exertion, 
an eminent position as an advocate. As a friend, 
he was devoted and reliable, of a kind and gentle 
heart, and a man of the strictest honor in his deal- 
ings, valuing his promise as a sacred pledge. Had 
he lived his friends looked confidently forward to 
the period when he should once more be called to 
serve his country in some capacity where his 
abilities would find proper scope. As he died so 
early, they are consoled to find that he achieved so 
much in the sphere open for his action, and left such 
memorials of his patriotism and genius as those 
which this sketch is intended to preface. 



THE 



BURNS CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 



SPEECH AT MOZART HALL, 

JANUARY 25Tn, 1859. 



Me. Pkesident : 

Why is it, sir, tliat the tear and tlie goblet are 
sparkling to-night on two hemispheres by moorland, 
highland, and street-side ? 

Why is it that the scattered clans, wherever they 
roam and whoever they serve, know but one chieftain 
to-night, as they rally around these far-apart banquets 
of joy and devotion, where the spell of one sacred name, 
one holy hour is upon us all ; so thoughtful, so grateful, 
so communicative, have we not come to pour out our 
souls for the soul which Robert Burns has given us, for 
the sweet strength he has added to whatever grace of 
feeling we possess ? 

Is he not the only man in all Scotland, be he a 
"Wallace, Bruce, or Stuart — is he not the only poet in all 
Christendom, though he were Dante, Milton, or Shake- 
speare — who can command these continuous jubilant 
1 



2 ADDRESS AT 

\ 

birth-nights — ^these clasped hands, these leaping pulses, 
those rich old S(;ottish songs, so fragrant with tnitli and 
fellowship, and which have gashed forth so spontaneously, 
so convivially, anniversary after anniversary, until they 
have at last reached this sublime epoch of remembrance, 
this centennial climax of appreciation which binds the 
hundredth year around the brow of his beauty and his 
immortality ? 

It is not because Robert Burns has added a few 
Scotch rhymes to English literature, that this humble 
tax-gatherer levies so deeply upon our tearsj our memo- 
ries and our love — it is not merely because a great poet 
has turned all the rivers and the flowers, the duties and 
the dreams of his country into harmonious and imperisha- 
ble verses, that you have summoned around you here 
to-night the eminent and the cultivated of this land to 
assist us in saying classically what we all feel so impul- 
sively ; but it is because he has touched the great com- 
mon heart by his identity with the common lot, through 
the whole varied range of high intellect, profound feeling, 
and lowly experience; because his muse has dropped a 
rose in every withered breast, and charmed the rough 
hand, the breaking heart, into graceful harmony with the 
necessity of their condition — shedding his songs, as 
patriots shed their blood, for the gloiy and honor of his 
country, the peace and purity of its homes. 

With all his faults, (and they were many,) with all his 
virtues, (and they were more,) stranger and native, classic 
and rustic, do we not all see the angel of a loving hiunan- 
ity walking in the flames of his genius, and lighting up 
the vast domain of Anglo-Saxon thought and feeling with 
new hope and power, ever invoking national unity, indi- 
vidual sympathy, and miiversal brotherhood ? 

We know that Campbell is a deathless songster. 



THE BUENS FESTIVAL, 3 

Ilohenlinden, tliougli a German battle, still reddens with 
the fire and shudders with the thunder of Scottish genius. 

W e know that the poetry of Scott will ring along the 
centuries chivalrously and heroically immortal. Lord 
Marmion, though slain in story, still lives in the memory 
of it, and the young Loch invar, if he got away from the 
Graeme and the I^etherby clans, he cannot escape us. 
Yet we know, too, that the genius of these poets, without 
being any more comprehensive than that of Burns, is less 
identified with the local life and native language of their 
country. They have said fine things of Scotland, and 
Scotland is both proud and grateful, but they have sung 
the twin tale of her glory and her sadness, more as 
admiring foreigners than loving natives. For them the 
laurel crown, and the cordial hand; — but the quivering, 
lip, the heaving breast, and the embracing arm, — these, 
these, — are thine only, oh, bard of Ayrshire ! 

Every vicissitude of fortune or temperament in Burns 
finds a congenial mouthpiece. If a Scotsman falls in 
love, he sends Burns to do the courting, and " Mary in 
Heaven " comes down and helps him love Nelly in Dum- 
barton. If a Scotchman is WTonged, he seizes a sonnet 
rather than a musket to vindicate himself. Many a 
skeptic has turned from the confusing jargon of the 
churches to find himself, with a few helpful verses of 
Burns, lifted up into the peaceful regions of a pure and 
permanent trust. How calmly does the " Cotter's Satur- 
day Night" glide us into the Sabbath morn, of a holy 
reverence for its pictures of piety and domestic virtue ! 
So deeply, too, is the genius of Burns imbued with the 
spirit of patriotism in his war song of " Scots wha hae," 
that had he lived at the battle of Bannockburn, it is 
impossible to say who would have contributed most to the 
deliverance of the country, Bruce with his impetuous 



4 ADDRESS AT 

charge of claymores, or Burns with liis vigorous thrust of 
sentences. One thing is certain, he was the first Scotch- 
man in modern history, who successfully invaded England 
with his native dialect. Not like Charles Edward, to 
retreat when within a hundred miles of the capital, but 
pushing on to London, captured the King and the whole 
royal family with tlie magic of his Gaelic inspirations. 

Earl Grey is said to have remarked that his persever- 
ing efforts in behalf of electoral reform had been much 
stimulated by the reading of Burns. Is he not the true 
legislator, wlio so shapes the heart of statesmanship ? 

What versatility of genius, too ! With all his gravity, 
how he revelled in the ludicrous! The Duchess of 
Devonshire is said to have been cured of an ague by 
laughing over Tarn O'Shanter. Tam reeled so comically 
into the presence of her Grace as to bring on a princely 
perspiration that broke the fever. Thus, in one breath is 
he shaking thrones with his appeals to freedom, and in 
the next, shaking sides with his attacks on our risibilities. 

There are those who decry poetry as being illusive 
and unpractical, and in the same breath employ it to 
strengthen their practicality. The clerk comes late to his 
counting room, and the practical merchant particularly 
reminds him that " the early bird gathers the worm ; " or 
perhaps he would change his business, again the practical 
man is ready with the poetical reproof that "the rolling 
stone gathers no moss.'" 

Poetry, next to Christianity, is the richest gift of God 
to man. All Art, all Science, the spirit of discovery and 
invention, and even religion itself, depend much upon the 
enthusiasm and the energy prompted by that union of the 
thoughtful and the ber.utiful which we call the poetical 
element ; not only does it cheer us with images of tender- 
ness and sublimity but it relieves truth from all sordid 



THE BURNS FESTIVAL. 5 

and conventional restraints, by applying tlie universal 
law of appreciation to every form of excellence, indepen- 
dent of partial distinctions, searchiiig out beauty not only 
in the star that shoots across the heavens, but in the pass- 
ing acts that flit before our lives, reducing the gold mine 
to its proper level in the landscaj^e, and elevating the 
gentlest ilower and the humblest eftbrt of duty to kindred 
communion with the grandest achievement. How much 
we tolerate in poetry what is forbidden in society ! We 
hang the beggar in our parlors and admire him as an effort 
of art, while as an effort of nature he is thrust into the 
street. The genius of Burns assumes neither the dramatic 
nor the epic form; with much of the sublimity, he has 
none of the audacity which aspires to occupy fields Homer 
and Shakespeare have exhausted. His genius is too direct 
and didactic, too personal and spontaneous, to bear the 
restraints of grouping and combining character. What 
he teaches us, he teaclies separately and by itself, through 
genial statements, rather tlian exciting incidents. 

He never would have conceived the madness of Lear, 
in order to intensify our horror of filial ingratitude, but 
he would have taken Goneril and Regan by themselves, 
dismissed the attendants, hushed the drums, put out the 
foot lights, and streamed such a flood of heaven-sent 
truths upon their conduct, as would have shamed all tiie 
daughters from 'John O'Groat's' to the Fifth avenue. 
The great aim of Burns' genius is to make us feel trutli 
as lovely, rather than to strike us as gtand : not with the 
imposing artistic complications of tlie orchestra does he 
break upon us, but like a lonely bird who has soared into 
the heavens, and sings to us of their purity, who has 
lighted on tree top, streamlet, and flower bush, with a 
loving word for their beauty and their freedom, who has 
]pecked at the palace gates, and knows of their barrenness, 



6 ADDKESS AT 

\ 

and who at last falls bleeding and wounded npon onr 
bosoms to be guarded and loved ever more. 

The poetry of Burns is simply the steps of a poor 
plain man keeping time to the richest music of the human 
soul, where obscure joys and uninteresting troubles are 
sublimed into universal beauties. Every trivial circum- 
stance in his path seems strung mth the strings of a harp, 
so melodiously do all ordinary facts play about him. 

How many daisies have been buried in the plough- 
man's furrow, and yet only one shall rise again to bloom 
on forever in the Heaven of the poet's inspiration ! How 
many dogs have barked and blest their masters with their 
knowledge and sagacity, yet only " two dogs " shall wag 
their tails at the coming ages ! 

Is it not usual for the morning light to play upon the 
graves of the humble departed? and yet there is one tomb 
and one form where that " lingering star with lessening- 
ray " shall come and deck that crumbling memorial, for 
loving companionship, with princes and rulers, and all 
who feel in its purity that universal passion which has 
gone through the world, bearing its electric fire into the 
human breast, and dashing its scarlet spray into the 
human countenance ever since man's first heart-throb 
broke on the deep calm of Eden. 

The love of Burns, unlike most men's love, was neither 
a transient passion nor an efieminate crisis in his life, but 
it formed the basis of his character, prompting and per- 
vading all the better flights of his imagination ; even his 
satires were battles for the heart, (the thistles defending 
their flower ;) at one time this love is a private passion, 
struggling in the ranks, side by^side with other emotions, 
at another it is a Generalissimo leading on all the forces 
of the soul to vast and varied aims of comprehensive good ; 
when woman's, beauty quickens it, how it shrinks into a 



THE BURNS FESTIVAL. 7 

personal fancy, ending in a ditty, or a wedding, as in 
Mary Morrison ; when philanthropy moves it how it 
expands into universal sympathy, into the sermon of the 
" unco-righteous," and that deathless line — " A man 's a 
man for a' that." 

Love is a part of the genius of Burns, and cannot be 
separated from it. Indeed, is not genius itself the love 
of the mind, making earnestness and sensibility the law 
of all high thought, as love itself is but the genius of tlie 
heart, sending the richest graces of thought and imagina- 
tion, in the very centre of our emotions for another ? 

Like life, love's highest hope is to be immortal. 

Like death, it is no respecter of persons, for it steals 
into the ball-room without a card of invitation, and 
edging its way up to the head couple, rummages under 
all the diamonds and point-lace embankments of the 
Duchess until it reaches the stripped-naked heart, shaking 
it with the most plebeian vigor ; then it descends into the 
kitchen, weaves the dish-cloth into a canopy, and seats 
down the cook royally under it ; indeed, the bell is ring- 
ing to replenish the parlor fire, at the very moment when 
the footman is throwing a scuttle-full of sentiment on his 
own flame, l^o nature is complete without this element 
of character. 'No zone has escaped it. ISTow it breathes 
o'er bustling nations the genial sedatives of peace and 
good fellowship ; now it tempers the awful glaciers of the 
Alps with the dissolving flame of catholic hospitality ; 
now it breaks meekly upon the earnest heart of Wilber- 
force ; and now it plays its lightning tricks under the flashy 
waistcoat of " Mr. Toots." It is freer than Charity, for it 
giveth away itself; it is broader than faith, for it beams on 
the faithless ; it is wiser than reason, for, while reason is 
groping for a God, love is beaming upon his bosom, and, 
with outstretched arms, calling upon the true and the 



8 ADDRESS AT THE BUKNS FESTIVAL. 

V 

treacherous to liurry under tlie shelter of its all-embracing 
presence. 

Such was the love and such the teachings of Robert 
Burns, a crushed and trodden spirit, who, like the sunken 
mines under our feet, has poured forth his wealth to bless 
the nations. The age is bristling all over with sharp 
questions about right and duty. Man is ever calling for 
a broader and deeper recognition of his humanity, the 
loftiest brows in every land are wrinkling with schemes 
to dethrone the crowned en'ors that baffle the brotherhood 
of races. 

Washington's sword has cut away the outer impedi- 
ment, Jefferson's pen has framed the outer charter, and 
as long only as such spirits as Robert Burns' shall follow 
in their path, moulding the inner life of the nation to 
beauty and fellowship, so long will humanity be hopeful, 
reform possible, and freedom safe. 



ORA.TIOISr 

DELIVEEED AT MONTICELLO, VA., AT THE 

TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFEESON, 

JULY 4TH, 1859. 



Fellow Citizens : 

I HAVE come from tlie city of ten tliousand masts, I 
have come from, the golden shores of the commerce-king 
and the palace home, where the roar of trade and the 
revels of fashion, the waving flag and the beating heart 
are busy with the beauty and the wealth of this hour. I 
have left them all to invoke the holier inspirations of this 
spot — to gaze with those distant mountains upon the 
grave of a loftier peak — I have come to bow my pilgrim 
breast before the cold grey tomb under which lies the 
withered hand, that penned the fortunes of this day. A 
hand that drew no blood, led no charge, pierced no foe, 
yet riddled an ancient monarchy witli the bulleted vigor 
of its virtue and its logic. 

"Was it not meet that so majestic a reach of character 
should have enthroned itself upon so imperial a sweep of 
scenery. And is it not possible that the bold freedom of 
the Declaration, owes something to the comprehensive 



10 ORATION AT THE 

grandeur of the scene wliere it was first conceived and 
partly indited. These wide-spreading undulations of 
plain and upland, these startling contrasts of grassy slope 
and high roaring precipice, where you cannot move with- 
out the spirit of beauty getting up to accompany you, 
where you cannot do a mean or little thing without 
something lofty looking down upon it — mountains rising 
with us in the morning and stretching up with our top- 
most hope into those impenetrable mists that skirt on 
immortality, while in the evening, dying suns are shower- 
ing the rugged summits with a light that shall cheer and 
chasten our own inaccessible aspirations. Would not 
such inspiring elements, prompt a great soul to grasp the 
magnanimous elevations of a great cause, and with cor- 
responding breadth of view dijffuse himself more sub- 
limely over the vast range of his country's hopes and 
interests. 

As I stand here this evening upon this consecrated 
summit, so sacred to that one death, second only in Yir- 
ginia's love to Mount Yernon's dearer dust, I sink in 
memory behind the high places of our present fortunes, I 
pass beyond the formative periods of the Convention and 
the Constitution, I go back to where no smoke of fraternal 
battlefields choke the light of peacefully descending suns, 
to where no Anglo-Saxon sword has pierced the Anglo- 
Saxon heart, and as I reach that earlier calm, that brood- 
ing pause which mentally moulds though it physically 
waits the dismembering moment, I see before me, breath- 
ing this bracing air, contemplating this inspiring view, 
standing thoughtful, admiring upon this lonely eminence, 
a young man whose worldly means and heavenly gifts 
have brought him here to settle, the permanent spirit of 
this spot. And this is in the year 1769, that year of por- 
tentous and gigantic births ; that year which gave new 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 11 

conquerors to empires and new discoveries to science ; the 
year wliicli rocked the cradles of ISTapoleon and Welling- 
ton, of Marshal Soult, Mehemet Ali, and Yon Humboldt. 
Later, in 1YY2, I see him again as your fathers saw him, 
toiling up this declivity, through the deep snow of that 
year. But he is bearing a melting antidote upon his arm. 
He brings a warmer flame to kindle at the hearth-stone, a 
softer bosom to mingle with the undulations of the land- 
scape. In the calm preceding the shock of the Revolu- 
tion, the flower of his afiections had sprouted. Without 
a pound of powder, or a single regiment, the widow 
Wailes, brought down this sturdy opposer of tyrants, and 
future ruler of prosperous States upon his knees to a 
weaker race, that conquers without humiliating the lords 
of creation. 

The graver dignity of history has not suflered by iden- 
tifying Thomas Jefferson, with a sentiment which cannot 
be kept out of boarding schools, and will slip into the cir- 
culation of kings. Reflning without enervating, exclusive 
but not selfish, impulsive yet conservative, the wildest 
joy and the soundest policy, that shakes the nerves but 
steadies the State, melting the citizen into the lover, 
swearing the lover into the husband, and giving back the 
husband with renewed dignity and efiiciency to the dis- 
charge of the civic and domestic relations, this profound 
political philosopher looked upon personal affection and 
its legal consequences, not only in the light of a definite 
and enduring partiahty of one to another, but also, as a 
solid political virtue which armed the patriot with a 
deeper strength and a stouter pulse to serve his country 
and perfect his character. 

JSTo man has ever administered the general rights or 
swayed the political thoughts of so many millions of 
beings, who more closely identified himself with the tastes 



12 ORATION AT THE 

V 

and interests of each member of liis own family. Jefler- 
son felt that he was serving his cause as much by the 
judicious rearing of a child, as by drafting stirring resolu- 
tions against a tyrant, or discharging the more pompous 
functions of Supreme power. He knew how one depended 
and reacted upon the other. He knew how the justice 
and humanity which come to us through good laws, do 
not confine themselves to mere out-door life, but like the 
invigorating breezes of heaven, go whistling through door- 
way and window pane, down to the very hearth-stone 
with their chastening music. He knew that if home is 
the rich contributor to the moral wealth of the nation, so 
does the government react upon the home, infusing into 
domestic discipline something of the dignity, the intelli- 
gence, and the forbearance which belongs to public 
authority. How the boy's romp would one day be the 
nation's energy. How the bounding vivacity of girlhood 
must calm into the serener enthusiasm of motherly devo- 
tion, and how responsible he was, ruler of millions though 
he might be, for the sensible moulding of their dawning 
forces. Indeed it may be literally said, that Thomas 
Jefferson brought up both simultaneously, his family in 
one hand .and his country in the other; alternately con- 
tracting himself to the meeker circle of home joys, the 
more genially to expand into a national blessing. This 
intense sympathy with individual life, constitutes the 
groundwork of that deeper faith in mankind, that con- 
stant courageous outpouring of self, for all, that belief in 
the instinctive power of the lesser minds of the masses to 
strike their own light, and work their own way to knowl- 
edge and happiness. This union of mental power and 
social interest ever moulded his creed to loving dimen- 
sions with all mankind, enthroning justice to all men^ and 
room for all men in all places, as the sterling law of pub- 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 13 

lie duty as well as private feeling, wherever tlie brain 
brings tlie chartered right to rise. In his dialogue be- 
tween head and heart, he makes the heart say, the world 
is full of trouble, to relieve its burdens we should share it 
between us. This with proper modifications is the key to 
his political system. A creed so grand, so safe, so broad, 
did it not shape the current of our earlier glory, and does 
it not plan the theory of our purest passing life ? Gleam- 
ing paramount through ode, ordinance, and essay; con- 
centrate in motto and proverb ; transfixed in medal and 
statue, glittermg on the festal drapery, rolling from the 
righteous canon, thundering in the deathless speech, the 
spear of all political fallacies, the hope of all political 
progress, rising with our prayers, dropping with our tears, 
difiicult as a system, beautiful as an ideal, sometimes pos- 
sible and always wise, has it not from the golden days of 
Athens, from Aristotle and the Amphyctionic assembly 
in the dark deluge of the invasion, through the communal 
revolutions of the middle ages, under crescent, cross, and 
feudal tower, the outward myth, the inward hope, slirink- 
ing, sinking, yet holding on by no severed link, with 
buried but dauntless tenacity, all the way from the Tar- 
peian to the Plymouth rock, landed at last, picking 
crumbs of privilege from the rich George's table until 
with its own bright flame it learns to bake its own loaf 
and lies down to be stunned and starved no more. Did 
not this sentiment shine like a miner's lamp on Jefierson's 
brow at the damp, dark commencement, and does it not 
redden along the heights of a fame second only to Wash- 
ington's in popularity, and beyond all modern or cotem- 
porary statesmen in breadth of political sympathy and 
sagacity? In contemplating human greatness, mankind 
will be most healthfully influenced by those who have 
been true as well as wise in the measure of their achieve- 



14 ORATION AT THE 

V 

ments ; wlio have exhibited most harmony between the 
greatness of their deeds and the purity of their lives. 

Does not the worship of great men constitute the only 
religion of a large portion of the human race, and are not 
these fair ideals too often shattered by abrupt inconsisten- 
cies of career, by painful contrasts between noble thoughts 
and ignoble weaknesses, which acting on lesser minds 
tend to content and conform them in their own predis- 
posed and now high-sanctioned degeneracy? Could all 
the sententious eloquence of the accuser of Catiline vindi- 
cate the morbid vanity so apparent in the biography of 
Cicero? How the "Common Sense" of Thomas Paine 
brightened and braced up the old colonial spirit, yet did 
not this Paine defy Christ, embrace the bottle, and leave 
America no safe spot to date his eulogy from? 

Is a distinguished author of our day quite sure that his 
"Household Words" are not loftier than his household 
deeds? Thomas Jefferson was a "plane of continued 
elevations," a complete harmony in life, mind, and charac- 
ter. His fame does not rest upon an eminence reached 
by the spasmodic upheaval of a few excellencies which 
often leave wide chasms of defects yawning beneath their 
higher traits. 

He did not, like Seneca, declaim against avarice with 
a million at usury. He will not like England's great 
chancellor astonish all mankind with his wisdom in dis- 
covering the truth and his meanness in taking bribes to 
suppress it. Nor like the great orator ro\', who poured 
forth such golden sentences upon the public credit and 
dropped not even one copper into the ear or hand of his 
own private creditors. Thomas Jefferson not only paid 
his own debts but beggared himself in discharging the 
obligations of others. He endorsed his name upon his 
country when she most needed the credit of that name, 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 15 

and those services and this make him immortal. He 
wrote that name npon liis friend's paper, and had he lived, 
it would have driven him from these lofty halls whose 
roof for more than half a century had domed his dearest 
joys and noblest conceptions. Hails which have wit- 
nessed the confidential consultations of some of the wisest 
and best men who have ever been called to the govern- 
ment of any land. Here for weeks and mouths passed 
many of the secluded hours of President Madison, one of 
the ablest framers, and President Monroe, one of the 
safest administrators, of the American Constitution. So 
frequent and familiar were their visits, that yonder door 
opens upon the " Madison Chamber," and farther on, the 
" Monroe Room," designates how closely those co-workers 
in a glorious statesmanship, were linked to personal sym- 
pathy and social brotherhood. How often have those 
three Presidents paced these halls with anxious solicitude 
and in deep patriotic communings for the success of* mea- 
sures which should counteract less wise and less temperate 
efforts of party feeling and selfish rivalry. How often, 
where I now stand, have^ these three Presidents drank 
their tea, invoked their God, tmd determined those mea- 
sures of public utility which have gone forth to disarm 
faction, strengthen the Kepublic, and immortalize them- 
selves. Was it not in this hall that Lafayette stepped 
from the unfinished portico, on his last visit 'to the United 
States, and clasped in one long speechless embrace the 
associate of his earlier and surer triumph? I see them 
now only a few feet from where I stand. I behold the 
meeting of Jefferson and Lafayette ; I witness their em- 
braces. They cannot speak; their hands are clasped, 
their breasts heave, their lips quiver; they cannot speak, 
for a loving, helpful, deathless past is filling them with 
tears and choking them with memories. They are think- 



16 ORATION AT THE 

ing of tlio great friend who has cninibled away, since long 
ago in licld and counsel they planned and won the right 
together. They are tliinking of this great cause which 
went forth an armed and tattered hope, now returned a 
peaceful, well-dressed fact, which shall bind for all time 
in America's grateful glory that host and that guest, as 
there they stand locked in each other's arms, the founders 
and the compeers of America's better life. 

The genius of this spot seemed always to reassure the 
republican sentiment, and no matter how despondent or 
exhausted the owner might seek his home from the per- 
plexities of official life, or the acrimonious assaults of poli- 
tical enemies, there was always something in the calm 
beauty and purity of the scene to cheer his faith and 
scatter the bolt. 

Perhaps the most enduring memorial of the variety 
and reach of Jefferson's powers are to be found in his ex- 
tensive correspondence upon Mechanics, Metaphysics, 
Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Politics with the great 
and the learned of his time in Europe and America. 
And always with a depth of knowledge and a force of 
reasoning without a parallel in one whose life had been 
devoted to the comparatively superficial and distracting 
duties of active political leadership. lie reasons with 
Cuvier and Buffon on natural history and zoology; 
against Cuvier he maintains his theory upon the size and 
physiology of animals with an ability and pertinacity, 
which in one instance verified his accuracy, by producing 
at an enormous personal expense the horns of a moose, 20 
feet longer than Cuvier had declared it possible to exist. 
"With Clark, when about to exj)lore the Louisiana pur- 
chase, during his administration, he urges upon the intrep- 
id traveller the advantages of the equatorial time table 
in determining his longitude, and with an ingenuity of 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 17 

/ 

argument and illustration that prove liow mucli lie mnst 
have observed and experimented upon the subject. In 
farmino;, enffineeriuo; and architecture, the chemical treat- 
ment of soils, the growth of tobacco, the importing and 
transplanting of trees, the possibilities of wine and grape 
culture, banishing the doctors, and curing the measles 
with his own prescriptions, inventing games for his chil- 
dren, advising with them in the minutest offices of dress 
or conduct, from the tying of a ribbon bow to the keeping 
of a commandment; and all this, too, while his whole 
energies seemed to be absorbed in the graver duties of 
administering the government : in founding a great 
jDarty, cementing a durable policy, supporting Washing- 
ton, supplanting Adams, nullifying Hamilton, warring on 
the throne threateners, bargaining with the god of war, at 
Paris, for a vast territorial support to his logic and his 
country. Corresponding, too, with Dr. Priestly upon 
religion, in a tone of discriminating reverence that refutes 
those bilious volleys against his Christianity, which in- 
duced a certain N^ew York clergyman, who visited his 
grave, to declare that he lay buried like a dog as he 
should. There was more religion in one wag of that dog's 
tail than in all the barking orthodoxy of such letters. 
Jefferson's religion, like his politics, his philosophy, and 
that unerring good sense which he brought to bear upon 
every form of duty, was the result of conscientious con- 
viction. And these convictions were the uniform jDrompt- 
ings of that full, rounded, thoroughly developed manhood, 
which impressed a successful individuality upon every 
element with which he grappled. With great men great 
actions are but the necessary fulfilments of their own 
natures, and these outpourings of soul which startle the 
world only relieve them. Even the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, the most j)rominent point in his career, which 
2 



18 ORATION AT THE 

V 

sent Lis name eclioing to tlie Pyramids, dropped serenely 
and natm-ally from him as his obvious share in a great 
crisis. "What a fine subject for an liistorical painting, the 
grouping of that sub-coramittee of three who were de- 
puted by their associates to report a draft of the Declara- 
tion. John Adams, the Colossus of the Eevolution, and 
Benjamin Franklin, the greatest philosopher of his day, 
turning involuntarily to Jeft'erson, as the ablest mouth- 
piece to the world of the difficulty and the remedy. Does 
not Franklin seem to say, I brought lightning from 
heaven, but yours is the hand to hurl it in graceful 
periods at the enemy? Without Washington's serene 
blending of the thoughtful and the heroic, he was equally 
devoted by will and mental adaptation to the civil side 
of a reconstructing era. It will be always to the interest 
of American emulation distinctly to preserve Washing- 
ton's character above and apart from critical comparisons 
with his Kevolutionary associates. If any one of them 
developed a faculty or a form of success greater in any 
particular direction than Washington exhibited, if Jeffer- 
son was the greatest expounder of the democratic creed, 
if Hamilton stands to the Federalists as the unapproacha- 
ble exponent of their centralizing faith, if Otis and Adams 
wooed the goddess of liberty with the prompt, fiery rhet- 
oric of gods, if General Greene achieved a masterly 
retreat and overcame almost insurmountable obstacles in 
generalship, if Allen and Putnam performed almost in- 
credible feats of physical hardihood, these individual 
characteristics, as elements of instruction, as subjects of 
pride and gratitude, should always, and will always, hold 
their place in the appreciation of posterity. But Wash- 
ino-ton not only led armies and settled States, but, by 
harmony of mental and moral organization, fused all these 
individual excellencies and particular antagonisms into 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 19 

« 

one grand complete military and civil success. "While 
others stand to America as types of some special relation, 
he represents the highest and most complete form of ab- 
stract excellence known to practical life. To the proud 
worldly business man, he is the grandest American form 
of successful ambition. To the theorist, the Christian and 
moralist, the most exquisite realization of duty in love and 
sacrifice under the severest of earthly temptations. 

While with hushed awe and impotent analysis, we 
leave Washington upon his lonely peak, the merits of 
those who surrounded him, who have more or less deter- 
mined since the civil polity of the government, will be fair 
subjects for criticism, as well as gratitude. To be dis- 
criminatingly grateful we must be cognizant of the extent 
of service which each one has rendered. All the great 
lights helped the crisis, and all have admirers. But what 
Henry, dropping the spirit of a giant from the lips of a 
seraph ; what Jay, delicate, conservative, and intellectual ; 
what Lee, finished, forcible and fastidious ; what Ran- . 
dolph, his eye rolling like a globe with the Union on fire 
in it, with fervor pungent, peculiar and satirical ; what 
Madison, so modest, so pure and comprehensive; who 
among them all, like Jeff'erson, have left patient students, 
determined vindicators, constant quoters, lasting followers 
of their creed and life ? Whose name is next to "Washing- 
ton's, is so deep in the patriot's heart, whose name so helps 
the partisan's cause and yet so rebukes the violence, the 
malignity and the selfishness of the partisan's life? If 
Hamilton left a policy or a party, like the king at a 
masquerade, it was killed in one of its disguises, and now 
lies mouldering with the remains of the late Whig organi- 
zation. Many and contradictory have been the comj^ari- 
sons drawn between these great chiefs and founders of 
America's constitutional statesmansliip. In their lifetimes 



20 ORATION AT THE 

\ 

both looked upon each other as deranged giants. Hamil- 
ton viewed Jefferson as a patriotic but dangerous, because 
inordinate believer in the good sense and morality of the 
people. Jefferson distrusted the republicanism of a man 
who was the affianced lover of British institutions, 
and though his intentions were honest, he believed the 
policy of Hamilton tended to a reaction against liberal 
principles, which must render all they had suffered, and 
all they had accomplished, only a dramatic episode, a 
temporary cessation in the hopeless permanency of re- 
established tyranny. Yet the very alarm of each was a 
benefit to both. The fear of others is often the cure of 
ourselves. As homoeopathy has frightened allopathy into 
small doses, so Jefferson's confidence in the people was 
possibly prevented from degenerating to extremes by the 
equally intellectual antagonism that confronted him. 
And there is no question but that Hamilton could never 
have retained his high position as the equipoise of "Wash- 
ington's administration, without that pacifying modifica- 
tion of doctrine so imperative in the harmonizing atmo- 
sphere of the chief. 

Washington's administration was born of the unanimi- 
ty of national gratitude, and demanded a corresponding 
conciliation in framing the national issues. 

It was a government of hope and thought, where 
policy should exist without rancor when it is urged with- 
out experience, where trade and currency, bank and 
tariff, must be intellectual disputes before they can settle 
into conceded truths. 

In organizing periods of government when thought is 
active and experience limited, every ably supported 
theory will have its champions. The alien and sedition 
acts were believed by many to be a healthy check on the 
abuse of free speech; laws against witchcraft, in ]^ew 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 21 

England, seemed indispensable for the protection of good 
society, against the return of absolute monal'chy under 
Lucifer ! and the followers of Jefferson and Hamilton, then 
nearly equally divided, how stand they all now in the 
popular regard. After long years of trial and develop- 
ment, after more than doubling the number of States and 
increasing the population eight liundred per cent., does 
not the policy of Jefferson control and has it not con- 
trolled the government for more than fifty, out of the 
seventy years of its existence? Is it not the father of 
every liberal act which has rectified the early crudities, 
and calmed the early and later fears of less wise, less 
hopeful periods of public sentiment? Has it not, with 
one or two accidental exceptions, seated its chiefs quad- 
rennially in the central chair? Has it not administered 
our foreign relations in a spirit at once watchful, vigorous, 
and abstemious ? has it not fought its way to the throne 
of popular approval, through the rain and lightning of a 
supreme adverse eloquence, of stump, press, and tribune ? 
Has it not sobered the intemperance of trade by its stop 
and pay policy, crushing with its own veto an arrogant 
bank charter, despite of all its silvery defences ? And 
when the importations were drowned in excess of duties, 
did it not shake the overtax from rustling silk and weak- 
ened tea? Under the storm of your passing politics, 
under the temporary struggles of Goggin and Letcher, of 
opposition and administration, beneath dark lantern and 
dark skin, and every wave of sectional and national agita- 
tion, lies the calm, perpetual pearl of Jefferson's liberal, 
admonitory, Union-loving, love-enkindling faith. 

Tlie sun which rolls once a day over this dull clod, 
dispenses no more comforting beams than his words have 
shot into the dark bosom of suffering nations. The fruit 
that buds so temptingly pendent in the surrounding 



22 ORATION AT THE 

\ 

prosi:)ect shall yield no such grateful plenty, as tlie cluster- 
ing truths that still drop from the ripened reach of his 
philosophy. The birds that come and perch upon the trees 
planted by his hands, and soothe with their gentle cadences 
the disembodied complacent shade, warble no such free 
and joyous melodies as those deeper tones in which he 
called a drooping and discordant people to redemption. 

Is not the grave wise as well as cold, and does not this 
hacked and pilfered granite, so significant of that rapacious 
gratitude which breaks the tomb to prop the recollections 
of it, does it not lift us with a grander strength to the 
heroic level of the day, and stir our hearts warmer and 
deeper than bugle strain, or bannered march, or measured 
speech, or any of those explosive stimulants to remem- 
brance with which praise has summoned art and genius to 
share and shape the current gladness ? Does it not say 
to us. Here lies the crumbling husk of a truth that is nour- 
ishing us all? Here lies all that can die of that philoso- 
phy which gave to your politics an enduring party, and 
of that patriotism which assisted us to a country ; fulfilling 
in one age the deep want of all the ages ? 

Can there be a holier help to the programme of this 
commemoration, than to chasten it with the dust of him 
who was the central figure in this day's convention, the 
classic spokesman of this day's resolve. Who plucked 
from their gloomy foreheads the brooding thoughts of 
three millions of colonists, and with the richest grace of 
England's speech, shapes the tale of England's wrong, 
defies the peal of England's gun, snaps the stretch of 
England's chain, and from a wider, warmer, bolder angle 
of revolutionary light, streams upon the world that death- 
less string of glittering generalities, which an eastern ora- 
tor has so devoutly designated the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. Aye, and it did glitter, like the morning sun 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 23 

as it slioiie upon tlie bayonets of our advancing army, and 
throngli the gusliing tears of an anxious, suffering, reviv- 
ing people. Aye, and it did glitter as it rose in tlie high- 
est atmosphere of our achievements, and dropped like a 
ball of fire upon the startled throne of the royal tax-gath- 
erer, elevating complaint into statesmanship, disciplining 
provincial murmurs into national rights, rounding ofl' 
dejected, disjointed rebellion into vigorous, hearty, com- 
pact revolution, and reducing the lawful sovereignty of 
an oppressive prince to the meaner antagonism of an out- 
lawed and discomforted innovation. Thus for all time 
will this string of generalities glitter a rosary where 
kneeling nationalities shall tell their beads to the holy 
spirit of liberty, as it beckons them on to freedom, truth, 
and progress. It is for this that thirty-three States turn 
their faces towards that grave to-day. It is for this that 
the grateful tear rolls down Pennsylvania's iron cheek, 
and California bends here in spirit her golden knee. It is 
for this that Maine and Georgia nod their acquiescing 
pines, and the kid glove of tlie Fifth Avenue, and the 
hard, bare hand fresh from the crasli of a frontier oak, 
clasp in concurrent pressure over the benefactor of all. 

Why else is it, that the powder and panegyric of the 
past have not exhausted the enthusiasm for this day ? 
Why else does the rocket of oratory still stream into the 
heaven of this inspiring theme, and breaking into stars of 
eulogy, fall like the early blessing in golden showers, upon 
ever receding and advancing anniversaries ? Has not this 
day, too, helped to mould that Constitutional bullet wdiich 
is now tearing its mangled way-along the broken columns 
of the oppressors of Italy? And does not the Tranco- 
Sardinian triumph pause and part its bleeding ranks, that 
the healing spirit of this day may pass through, to cheer 
and sanctify a kindred purgation ? 



24 ORATION AT THE 

I do not mean to say that the spirirof this Declaration, 
so brave, so thoughtful, so appropriate, would have seemed 
aught else than an ambitious paradox, had not the blade 
of "Washington gleamed in front of it, and the sturdy forti- 
tude of the people bristled behind it ; I do not mean to 
say that even then, with the dead all buried, and the foe 
all gone, swords dropped, heads raised, the embraces, the 
congratulations, and the huzzas for a common flag un- 
furled, and a common hope secured, 1 do not say that 
even then, there would have been anything in the specta- 
cle, but a fine embarrassment, a successful discord, a wide- 
reaching sense of something gained, but nothing sure, had 
not our ancestors wisely conceived that a flying, acquiesc- 
ing enemy was only one side of a true battle ; that there 
is a constructing as well as a destroying element in all 
substantial victories ; that a people who would retain 
calmly and permanently the elevation reached tlirough 
mere temporary excitement of more physical efibrt, must 
be capable of forbearance as well as assault; must be 
lovers of peace as well .as heroes of war; must be ever 
ready with the thought before the blow ; must feel deeply, 
and feel habitually and j)ractically the necessity for order, 
for intelligence, for obedience to law, for patience in bear- 
ing with trials as well as hope in looking for blessings, 
whose alternating possibilities so cheer and imperil the 
life of a new truth. 

To secure all this, much was to be accomplished, and 
something to be forborne. A wise people will remember, 
in constructing a new system, how much of the old diffi- 
culty deserves to be respected, how much of the past must 
be dropped, how much of the future should be anticipated 
and incorporated into a government destined to be admin- 
istered widely and permanently, for many equal sovereign- 
ties, with their sharp, watchful, local life, their ever- 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 25 

clianging politics, tlieir sectional antagonisms and tlieir 
varied conflicts of peaceful but perplexing interests, look- 
ing to this wide, general, federal life, for the harmonizing 
element, which should mould them into one common 
brotherhood of feeling and fortune, at once the umpire of 
their differences, and the symbol of tlieir nationality. To 
achieve such a consummation at such a period, divides, if 
it does not distance, all the glory of the battles that pre- 
ceded it. Not that we would or could underrate the 
merits of that seven years' conflict. A war, intimate and 
individual, because a war for existence rather than policy : 
a war with less of the dignity of great battles than the 
dramatic intensity of fugitive encounters. A ^war often 
with only a wagon tongue for artillery, God for a judge, 
and all history for applause. A war with bleeding feet 
for a surer footing, a war that could live upon a potatoe 
to rout a king ; a war behind fences, behind barns, on the 
old haystack, under the tottering shed, charging with a 
regiment or a dog, hurling a brick, whizzing a stool, de- 
stroying the harvest, blighting the fruit, darkening the 
sun, anything, anywhere, so it crush the foe, shatter the 
wrong, and clear the land. 

Would not such a contest require more judgment in a 
commander and more nerve in the troops, where ambu- 
lance and ambuscade rendered numbers almost powerless 
and tactics often useless ? To rush up to an> enemy with 
miles of companions cheering on your courage, with thou- 
sands all around yon ready to help you strike, and ready 
to help you die, to be provided with every camp and field 
equipment, well fed, well clothed, glittering with expen- 
sive armor, thirsting for expectant booty, with all the 
tramp and pomp of stirring drum and streaming flag and 
rushing hosts, to make death look grand as well as dread- 
ful, with such surroundings when the soldier sinks away. 



26 ORATION AT THE 

brave battalions go down with liim, silken banners droop 
liglitlj over him, and far-off tears ftxll for him, sad but safe 
from the ruthless carnage. But when Freedom calls her 
sons to battle, the fight is less for victory than for safety. 
It does not wait always to hoard itself on pompous battle 
fields, it has not time always for dainty selections of posi- 
tion for strategical manoeuvres, for reconnaissances, for 
artistic feints and counter-movements. It is too busy 
with nature to wait for science. If it sees the foe, it feels 
the WTong and strikes the blow, w^hether it be to bleed, to 
die, or to triumph. In mass or in detail, debouching or 
encamping, asleep or awake, through burning sand, on 
cracking ^ce, over the unfathomable, up the inaccessible, 
round the impervious, the spirit of liberty moves on with 
shoeless feet, cheering the foodless body through the path- 
less forest. The pillar of fire is there to light the way, 
the manna has fallen from the approving heavens, the rod 
has come to strike the rock, and as the dying patriot's 
life-blood ebbs away, his glazed eye sees the martyr's 
crown descending. He fights not for fame, for adventure, 
for family compacts, for old traditions, or new acquisi- 
tions, for Hapsburg, Guelph, or Komanoff. He strikes 
for his home, his shop, his farm, his blushing bride, his 
prattling babe, the grassplat where he rolled when a boy, 
the old family Bible, the tin-cup by the well, the smile, 
the ease, the calm of sure possession, the right to speak 
when he thinks it, and to do right w^lien he knows it. 
This is not a mere war, but an insurrection of humanity to 
readjust the lost harmony of creation. Yet wars for free- 
dom are common wars. Every nation under the sun has 
fought them and won them at some period of their lives. 
Have not the passive nations, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, 
and Scandinavia; have not the wild notes of freedom 
rung through the Cymbric forests and awakened the 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 27 

earlier but less degenerate German, from tbe gloom of his 
paralyzing dynastic metapbysics ? Have not tbe sensa- 
tional nations, bave not France and Spain and Italy and 
even wiltering turbaned Turkey, with tbe loaded muzzle 
of tbe Slavonic gun at ber breast, bave not and do not all 
tbese taste tbe sweet waters of self-won independent 
national life? Has not sbivering Poland and melting 
Hayti and silver-veined, blood-freckled Mexico unfurled 
to different zones a bumanizing as well as a depraving, a 
gracious as well as a gbastly epocb, of E Pluribus Unum ? 

Do we point to tbe bleeding feet, tbe empty purse, tbe 
powerful foe, and tbe undeveloped strengtb of tbe coun- 
try, as tbe test of superior results witb adverse means, 
but does not tbe poor, bardy Briton contend for ages 
against Koman, Scot, and Dane, and did not tbe Caliph 
Omar conquer all Asia on barley water ? "What then sets 
the broad, common seal of universal applause upon us ? 
It is that having won independence, w^e organized tbe 
victory into a destiny, instead of permitting it to evaporate 
into a tradition. After tbe battle over tbe enemy, we 
conquered ourselves. I do not mean to say that we 
merely framed a constitution, that was commendable, but 
that was also usual. 

France constructed beautiful theories of government. 
Tbe Abbe Sieyes' pigeon-boles were full of brilliant con- 
stitutions. And is not Mexico gifted witb a like facility 
of political expression ? But did not France and Mexico 
forget that tbe constitution of tbe individual must come 
to the support of tbe constitution of tbe state ? — " You 
must and you shan't " on paper is nothing without " I 
ought and I will " lies deep in tbe heart and faith of tbe 
man. 

One of tbe great leading virtues of republicanism, is 
tbe moral abstinence of its leaders, who can avoid tbe 



2S ORATION AT THE 

temptations to overthrow their own great work, when 
it interferes with their own love of office. This selfish 
thirst for prominence, this intense jDersonal egotism which 
thinks " I " so necessary to the state, a weakness as tell- 
ing in war, as it is threatening and embarrassing nnder 
the calm, wise rotation of official life. Did it not help 
to destroy French liberty by confusing and over-working 
French glory ? "Was not the Mexican constitution of 1824 
in the main a liberal, genial moulding of its national life, 
and was not the first term of the chief office the last free- 
working of the instrument ? Why ? Because the end of 
official victory was tlie beginning of personal treachery. 
Because the animal love of pelf came before the thought- 
ful remembrance of right, and when the ballot dropped 
the candidate, the candidate seized the bayonet to pierce 
the ballot ; forgetting that his country was greater, his 
glory surer, his interest more secure, and his children 
certain of a prouder inheritance, by obeying that ballot, 
than could be secured through any temporary ascendency 
of successful treason. 

The difierence between American liberty and the 
liberty which other nations have attempted, is the differ- 
ence between patience and self-denial, in waiting for the 
fair working of a system independent of all personal 
defeats, and that selfish liberty which concludes a system 
exploded, because a man or measure is for a time unsuc- 
cessful. When an American loses his office he keeps his 
temper. If he goes home disappointed he is not disaffect- 
ed. If troops are to be summoned they consist of well- 
mounted arguments. If banners are to wave, they glisten 
with the issues of the next contest. A better sagacity 
teaches him his tniest revenge is in watching and expos- 
ing the defects in the policy or powers of his successful 
adversary. This reveuge is mounted upon a stump. 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 29 

buried in an article, passed in a resolution, and diffused 
in intense liand-bills tlirougli the land, where thought 
may resolve the truth, and opinion decide the contest. 
Thus the system lives, power rotates, and America is safe. 
Not that we are exempt from any and all the vices of 
other nations, — not that we do not love money equal to 
the Jew, and power as much as the Hapsburg, — not but 
we have jurists that misconstrue the statute, and officials 
who degrade their office, great crimes and little mean- 
nesses which no civil system shall pluck from this human 
system. But we possess the virtue to keep those vices in 
constitutional subjection to law, to public sentiment, and 
the original compact. And when vices are thus repressed 
within the limits of personal responsibility without 
molesting a better development, then democratic America, 
independent of all incidental weaknesses, has taken one 
great step towards the improvement and elevation, of the 
human race. 

It is the fashion of some brilliant European satirists to 
ask what has the great Republic accomplished besides 
geography and gasconade. Your pride dilates, your 
population increases, and your empire widens, but does 
truth expand with them ? You build fine ships, you raise ' 
good cotton, and play a strong game of chess, but is order 
as well preserved as in France, has opinion as fair play 
as in England, are not high taxes and low nlorals, grog- 
bought votes, light fingers and heavy speeches, the laws 
of your political life? Where is that millennium of mo- 
tives,^that approximation to perfection promised by free 
institutions ? Democracy means perfection no more than 
revolution in government means revolution in human 
nature. Our democracy does not pretend to reconstruct 
the human mind, but it removes the hereditary power, 
crushing excuse for not reconstructing itself. It says to 



30 ORATION AT THE 

tlie individual life and to the national life, I have removed 
the great central hinderance to the liberal development 
of your thoughts and interests. I have purged your land 
of imperial self-elected arbiters; I have thrown open 
every attainable position to your ambition, your industry, 
your genius and your sense of duty. If the humblest 
man keep the law he shall help to make the law, and to 
rise by the law. If the greatest man break the law he 
shall feel and fall by the compact outraged, the truth for- 
gotten, and the boon forfeited. Would you be great 
among the nations, great among yourselves, true before 
God, and the progress for which you are striving ? Would 
you justify this radical deviation from the established 
systems of the older nations ? Would you leave anarchy 
no chance, tyranny no plea, envy no sneer, then let the 
shivered dream of disappointed Europe be the sweet 
realization of successful America. Raise yourselves up 
to the level of the good man's hope, above the range of 
the bad man's logic. Read, think, watch, work, pray 
and wait. Accept all men's thoughts, reject all men's 
•chains. While you refuse England's tax invoke Eng- 
land's genius. Call on Shakespeare's deep heart and 
brain, born for Lion, Lily, Shamrock, Thistle, or Eagle, 
sinking so mysteriously into the whole reflective life of 
humanity — call on Milton, who shall come to you with a 
deep strength that shall do its part in making this liberty 
a paradise regained, as to other nations it has ever been 
a paradise lost. Call on the Apostles fresh from com- 
muning with a God. Their faith and their love shall be 
the arches of your own amelioration. Let science that 
disciplines, and trade that sharpens, and art, and poetry, 
and eloquence which warm and beautify the valley of the 
shadow through which you are passing, — let all these 
and the failures, and the little weaknesses that add to the 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 31 

common experiences, and tlie great examples wliicli stir 
life's better moments, — let the example of Washington, 
whose calm features invoke you as they lie looking out 
from every letter sent, from every letter received, a per- 
petual admonition that your confidential as well as your 
open purposes be pure and patriotic, — let the good and 
true of all times and regions, despite of boundary, pass- 
port or clanshijD, pour their vast wealth of help into the 
advancing march of this hopeful, possible experiment 
of American liberty. This is what democracy promises, 
justice demands, and humanity deserves. Our democracy 
then is non-intervention. Keep off others while you 
help yourselves. 

It is the fortune of our political system that the avail- 
able intelligence of the country has increased more rapid- 
ly than the evils inseparable from the existence of an 
unrestrained liberty of thought and action. Before the 
licentiousness of the press came the healthful freedom of 
the ]3ress. Anterior to official corruption, there presided 
over public employment a spirit purified by the memory 
of its sufferings, and which prompted the holders of 
public trusts to become rather tlie tutors than the robbers 
of those who confided in them. The moral side of our 
adversity has raised the community of these States above 
and beyond the degenerating influences of our prosperity ; 
official life is no longer the leading life, because it has 
dissevered thought from place, and has ceased to satisfy 
the mental cravings of the unofficial intelligence that has 
grown up silently but solidly beyond it. 

Notwithstanding the Declaration of Independence, 
every man must bend his knee to some one ; yet you will 
seldom hear those hinges creaking to a mere " Honorable," 
or " Excellency." A good preacher, a brilliant lecturer, 
has more personal influence than a President of the 



32 ORATION AT THE 

United States. And he keeps longer possession of that 
better White House, a substantial duty-domed apprecia- 
tion. In early days politics were respected for what they 
had achieved, now they are tolerated for what they sug- 
gest. The earlier founders are gone, the later and pro- 
founder interpreters have sunk away without leaving 
hardly an heir, or a ghost, to their intellectual thrones. 
These gigantic elevations have disappeared to be repro- 
duced in the average elevation of the nation. Denuded 
of her great men, America falls back upon the general 
splendor of her destiny. I^To longer relying upon the 
gifts of a few superiors, she works more and worships less. 
To you, O Virginians ! in times past was soon com- 
mitted the milk, the brain and the spear of this democ- 
racy. Your "Washington achieved it ; your Jefferson 
expounded it ; your Madison and your Monroe admin- 
istered, strengthened and distributed it to new eras and 
to new States, the bread and Bible of their expanding 
political life. If Virginia has been content with this 
deeper glory — if she has forgotten to grasp, in her ability 
to teach — if, for the ship of State, she has neglected all 
other shipping, and like those gifted spirits who have 
been too busy with thought to load the body with jewelry 
and laces, then has she at least a share in the glory of the 
material grandeur that encompasses her more bustling 
sister States. If New York city has accumulated more 
gold, does not Virginia's earlier soul put the pulse into 
those dumb-shining power-gods, and make them throb 
with a truer value. We have streets that could buy 
States, and alleys that might purchase Ten-itories. In 
this western world. Wall Street is the fiscal crutch upon 
which lame Commonwealths limp to fortune. But is not 
Virginia the moral bosom from whence America draws 
the nerve and the nourishment of her loftier fate ? 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 33 

Like the sun, New York capital penetrates every 
crevice of the confederacy, gleaming through the forest 
leaves and along the hunter's track, stopping the fire of 
the prairie with the fire of its own circulation, and hush- 
ing the cry of the panther and the wolf in the safer roar 
of legitimate trade. Does it not build cities, launch 
navies, send the warm heart of philanthropy shivering 
into the Arctic circle, where this ever restless capital feels 
with its golden hand, among the lonely ices of the North, 
for the lost navigator of England? And yet, has not 
Virginia's thought and heart, not only sought for, but 
found that lost navigator of humanity and the world, the 
truth which has made love and happiness possible through 
a wisely guarded liberty ? 

How poor and cheap seem the rich man's wealth, and 
the pioneer's axe and muscle — how weak and inefficient 
all the tools and the toils of settlement, clearing a copse, 
dodging a tomahawk, breaking a plough, losing a wife or 
a crop — how unrecompensed the loss, if Yirginia's charter 
is not there to cheer and chasten the vicissitude ; if such 
sweet music as the Declaration and the Farewell Address 
break not once a year upon the new atmosphere to edu- 
cate the emigrant's ear, his heart and his child, to do their 
part in the building up and advancing of this multiplied 
galaxy of sovereignties. Yet Yirgima is not merely a 
great memory, her present facts lie bold and *bcautiful all 
around us. This lovely scenery is full of them ; your up- 
lands covered so unusually liigh with available soil ; your 
fertile valleys that hoard all the descending nourishment 
of the Alleghanies, that boundless mineral wealth, which 
near and distant enterprises are plotting to pluck from 
the depths of your western ranges ; while from a thousand 
intersecting angles innumerable water courses are spark- 
ling and bounding, and calling with all their passionate 
3 



34 OEATION AT THE 

\ 

poetry of liquid utterance for the wheels that shall turn 
their beauty to good account. And does not the increase 
of plank and railroads projected and accomplished, tell of 
the newly awakened energy of the people, and point to an 
early removal of those temporary obstacles to an extend- 
ed and equally diffused prosperity ? 

And now, after all that has been uttered and hoped 
of this 4:th of July, what invoking influence has it upon 
the people ? After all the logic, the sentiment, the 
exhaustive analysis, the broad reach of national duties 
enjoined, the near possession of personal rights commended, 
the imagery, and the pathos with which genius and grati- 
tude have gorged this heroic hour, does it really tone and 
admonish the advancing fortunes of this nation ? are we 
a wiser and better community for its coming ? Does it 
drop its wholesome example of love and faith into the 
unseen rills of private conduct, purifying both business 
and pleasure? Does it pour its glorious examples of 
courage, magnanimity and self-sacrifice into the wider 
channels of public achievement, winging our leaders to a 
loftier patriotism, and so chastening the temptations which 
beset them, that purity and honesty shall become the 
most fascinating forms of prominent endeavor ? As the 
earlier and the earnest Fourth recedes, will not the daz- 
zling glare of a rapidly expanding success by degrees efface 
the instructive gloom of the past, until the later Fourth 
retains only the noise without the moral, the cracker 
without the flash of high warning ? 

Is not every individual freeman by nature a despot, 
and is not freedom really the promptings of a disappoint- 
ed love of tyranny, that writhes to see the one despot 
enjoy what all crave but cannot share ? Is not !N"ew Eng- 
land with her overwhelming anti-slavery majority, the 
bitterest slave-driver, when she emigrates southward ; 



TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 35 

and do they not say that Howard the philanthropist was 
exacting in his own household ? 

The salvation of our system so far is, that wealth does 
not act in politics, and therefore it cannot plot ; while 
wealth only thinks in trade, it may be sharp, narrow and 
selfish, but it is not dangerous to the State, because it 
does not attempt to corrupt the State. Its money bags 
during the rich man's life are but the harmless furniture 
of a bank vault, a railroad contract, and when he dies, it 
only sends a few light headed-heirs reeling to the Colise- 
um or the Boulevard. But let us imagine Mr. Astor 
smitten with an active persevering passion for politics. 
Shall I say, or you say what office he could not buy ? If 
a man with one-tenth of his wealth, and no more intellect, 
could be a G-overnor and a U. S. Senator, I do not pretend 
to point to the harbor his golden rudder would not steer 
him into. ISTot that corrupt politicians for the present 
are anything but laughable nonentities, with no great 
men to think for them, and few rich ones to pay for them, 
yet the great danger is that, with the immense facilities 
for accumulating wealth, a class of rich intellectual men 
must rise between the great present strength of the coun- 
try, the honest working man, and the penniless dema- 
gogue. The rich man too thoughtful to be idle, too 
wealthy to work, must do something, and that something 
will be the plotting for power ; this has ever been in all 
countries the destiny of that class, because politics is a 
compromise between sensuality and literature. It has the 
excitement of dissipation with the thoughtfulness of a 
mental efibrt. All experience proves that our virtues 
thrive best upon a threatened comjpetency . When we pos- 
sess enough to be comfortable but not the overplus that 
begets self-sufficiency and indifference. Now the mo- 
mentum of the old truth is still upon us. The great 



36 OEATION AT THE TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 

names burned in fire upon our hearts still influence us. 
We are a working and acquiring people. Idle wealth 
has not yet begun to actively influence industry nor way- 
lay honesty. But must not that dread day come, when 
the replenishing element of emigration has ceased, when 
the vast solitudes are exhausted of their fertility by the 
drain of central cities, and silk skirts are trailed upon the 
Eocky Mountains, when those great names of our past 
that look so solemn and so beautiful to our present grati- 
tude shall be somewhat dimmed by years, and newer eras 
of experience, and more dazzling forms of selfishness 
shall have brought by contrast distrust upon the existence 
of Washington ; are there any elements or symptoms in 
our present life that give us the right to place ourselves 
above history, that we shall not sink back again, first to 
demagogues' dupes, then autocrats' serfs, as surely as the 
freest land touches at its farthest extremity, geographically, 
upon the despot's vast cold iron home ? 

Yet the spirit of the day is hope not history ; before 
we reach that far alternative and descent, let us believe 
that new and greater elevations beckon to us from the 
mists of the future. Let us believe that we are to be the 
founders of purer races, discoverers of greater truths, the 
destroyers of evils that have obstructed the better growth 
of past ages ; and with the inspiring faith lifting us above 
the meaner promptings of this material life, we shall reach 
a deeper possibility of deviation from the revolving 
periods of decay. 

Then, if that decay must come. He who holds us in 
the hollow of his hand will but fold his dissolving children 
more warmly to his central bosom, and we shall feel how 
good it was for us that the shadows of lesser worlds should 
pass over us, and through change make us fit for the un- 
changeable. 



SPEECH 



GREAT MEETING IN UNION SQUARE, 

APEIL 20TH, 1861. - 



Fellow-Citizens : 

The iron hail at Fort Sumter rattles on every northern 
breast, and has shot away the last vestige of national and 
personal forbearance. A loaf of bread on its way to a 
starving soldier was struck from his mouth by a shot from 
his own brother. You might saturate the Cotton States 
with all the turpentine of North Carolina; you might 
throw upon them the vast pine forests of Georgia, then 
bury the Gulf storms' sharpest lightning into the combusti- 
ble mass, and you would not redden the southern horizon 
with so angry a glow as flashed along the Northern heart 
when the flames of Fort Sumter reached it. To-day, 
bewildered America, with her torn flag and her broken 
charter, looks for you to guard the one and restore the 
other. How Europe stares and liberty shudders, as from 
State after State that flag falls, and the dream breaks! 
Hereafter Southern history will be as bare as the pole from 
which the sundered pennant sinks, and treason parts with' 



38 SPEECH AT THE 

\ 

the last rag that concealed its hideousness. I know how 
common and how easy it was to dissolve the Union in our 
moutlis. Dangerous words like dangerous places possess 
a fearful fascination, and we have sometimes looked down 
from the heights of our prosperity with an iiTCsistible dis- 
position to jump oflf. 

This old ghost of disunion is at last a verity. For 
years it has been skulking semi-officially about the Capitol. 
Through the whole range of our parliamentary history 
every great question, from a tariff to a Territory, has felt 
its clammy touch. Did it not drop its death's head into 
the tariff scales of '33, hoping to weigh the duties down 
to a conciliation level ? Did it not shoot 'its ghastly logic 
into the storm of '20, and frighten our soundest statesman- 
ship into that crude calm called the Missouri Compromise ? 
Did it not sit grinning upon the deck of all our naval 
battles, hoping to get a turn at the wheel, that it might 
run the war of 1812 upon a rock? Did it not stand up 
upon the floor of Congress and shake its bony finger in 
the calm face of WAsniNGTON? And did not our fathers, 
who stood unmoved the shock of George the Third's 
cannon, shudder in the presence of this spectre, when they 
thought how the infant Republic might be cast away upon 
its bleak and milkless breast ? Then it was a thin, skulk- 
ing, hatchet-faced ghost, living on the crust of partial local 
politics ; at last, fed upon the granaries of Northern and 
Southern fanaticism, it has come to be a rotund, well-fed, 
corpulent disaster. Southern passion may put on war- 
paint ; Southern statesmanship may attempt to organize a 
pique into an empire, to elevate a sulk into a sacrament, 
by marrying disappointment to revolution and reducing a 
temporary constitutional minority into a hopeless organic 
political disaster, yet Northern interests and Northern pride 
will never, while there is a dollar to spend or an arm to 



GREAT MEETING IN UNION SQUARE, 39 

strike, acquiesce in the disruption of this world-envied, 
God-favored, and gulf-bound Confederacy. 

Talk of the wise statesmanship of the South ! Had 
they allowed Kansas to become a Free State, without that 
vindictive imperiousness of opposition which proclaimed 
them to be quite as much opposed to Free Government as 
to Free Soil, Jeff & Co. would have been in possession of 
the National Government at this moment. Although the 
repeal of the Missouri Compromise awoke the North from 
its deep sleep upon the slave question, yet the most eco- 
nomical outlay of prudence would have continued them 
in possession of the Government for an indefinite future. 
Then Mexico would have been possible without the awful 
leap which copies her morals without the hope of possess- 
ing her territories. South Carolina once lived upon a 
potato to rout a king, and she is fast going back to that 
immortal vegetable, in order to crown a fallacy. Our 
Kepublicanism means the whole nation, or it means 
nothing. Together the parts temper each other, asuuder 
the aristocracy of the slave power makes equality a myth, 
and the free radical North less safely Democratic. 

You may break friendship, break hearts, and call 
conventions to break laws, but nature stands and runs on 
through the gap you have made with tongue or pen. 
What ! split the Blue Ridge that joins Pennsylvania to 
Virginia ! No Mississippi winding through* our States ! 
No Gulf wave moaning on our sand-beach ! No sugar- 
cane sweetening our landscape ! 

When the South seceded, not a contract made for the 
meanest consideration in the farthest Northern village, but 
feels and is wronged by an act which withdraws the great 
enfolding area of the Union from its promised and univer- 
sally supposed protection. If AVashington is to be no 
longer known as the successful contender for a combined 



40 SPEECH AT THE 

V 

and self-regulating nationality ; if Bisliop Berkeley's star 
of empire lias crumbled away into belligerent asteroids, 
and we are to fall, like Ccesar, at the base of this black 
Pompey's pillar — we shall at least go into this holy battle 
for the Constitution with no law broken, and no national 
duty unfulfilled. We have not stolen a single ship, or a 
pound of powder, or a dollar of coin to sully the sacred 
tramp with which patriotism pursues robbery and rebel- 
lion. All the ills of the South could have been remedied 
within the Constitution — all their wrongs righted by the 
victory of future votes. Shall I tell you what Secession 
means ? 

It means ambition in the Southern leaders and misap- 
prehension in the Southern people. Its policy is to 
imperialize slavery, and to degrade and destroy the only 
free Republic in the world. It is a fog of the brain, and 
a poison at the heart. Dodging the halter, it walks uj)on 
a volcano which may explode if ever a law-loving people 
are driven to extremes in maintaining its own national 
life. We have not come here to talk up a man, but keep 
up a flag; not to vindicate a creed, but nullify a crime ; 
not to seek the falling fruits of patronage, but to save the 
beautiful and wide-spreading tree upon which all our 
blessings grow. Party and partyisms are dead ; only grim, 
black powder is alive now. Who talks of Tammany or 
Mozart ILill? Who haunts the coalhole or the wood- 
pile, when all our soul's fuel is on fire for flag and 'country ? 

Did not AVashington fight seven years, break ice on the 
Delaware, break bones and pull triggers on Monmouth 
field, send ten thousand bleeding feet to where no blood 
ever comes, and pass from clouds of smoke to archways of 
flowers — for what? That States should defy their best 
guardian, which is the nation, insult history, and make 
Pepublicanism impossible ? 



GKEAT MEETING IN UNION SQUARE. 41 

Here in this city of our love and pride, this cradle of 
the civil life of Washington, where despotism sheathed 
its last sword and constitutional liberty swore its first oath ; 
where steam first boiled its way to a throne, and art, and 
commerce, and finance, and all the social amenities 
marshalled their forces to the sweet strain of the first 
Inaugural — here, where government began and capital 
centres, is the sheet-anchor of American loyalty. Nothing 
so disappoints secession as the provoking fidelity of Kew 
York to the Constitution. 

Jefif expected to pay his army in Wall Street, and 
pick up a secessionist under every lamp-post. Fifty 
thousand men to-day tread on this fallacy. Gold is 
healthy, gold is loyal, gold is determined ; it flows easy 
because the war is not to subject or injure any one, but to 
bring back within the protecting folds of tJie Constitution 
an erring and rebellious brother ; a brother whom we have 
trusted and toasted, fought with side by side on the battle- 
field, voted for at the ballot-box, showered honor after 
honor upon his recreant head, while that brother was 
poisoning the milk in his mother's breast and striking a 
parricidal blow at a paternal Government which has 
protected and prospered us all as no people were ever so 
prospered and protected. Heretofore in our differences 
we have shouldered ballots instead of bayonets. With a 
quiet bit of paper in our hands we have marched safely 
through a hundred battles about tarifiP, bank, anti-liquor, 
anti-rent, and all those social and political questions about 
which a free people may amicably diflier. If slavery can- 
not be appeased with the old life of the ballot, depend 
upon it the bayonet will only pierce new wounds in its 
history. We have heretofore kept all our lead moulded 
into type, that peaceably and intellectually we might 
enter the Southern brain, until passion and precipitation 



42 SPEECH AT THE 

V 

have forced us to melt down that type into a less friendly 
visitor. 

Kossuth says that bayonets think, and ours have re- 
solved in solemn convention to think deeply, act prompt- 
ly, and end victoriously. 

Do you wonder to-day to see that flag flying over all 
our reawaked national life, no longer monopolized by 
mast-head, steeple, or liberty-pole, but streaming forth a 
camp signal from every private hearthstone, breaking out 
in love-pimples all down our garments, running like wild 
vine-flowers over wliole acres of compact anxious citizen- 
ship ? Why has that tender maiden turned her alabaster 
hands into heroic little flag-stafiPs, which, with no loss of 
modesty, unveils to the world her deep love of country ? 
Do you see that infant tottering under rosettes, and 
swathed in the national emblem by foreboding parents, 
who would protect its growth with this holy talisman of 
safety ? Do you see, too, those grave old citizens, sharpened 
by gain-seeking, and sobered with law-expounding, invade 
their plain exterior peacock hues, which proclaim such 
tenacity to a flag that has fanned, like an angel's wing, 
every form of our prosperity and pride ? 

It seems hard for philosophy to divine how any section 
of the country, so comprehensively prosperous, could allow 
a mean jealousy of another portion a little more wealthy 
and populous to so hurry it on into rebellion, not against 
us, but a common Government and a common glory, to 
which both are subject and both should love. 

Does not each State belong to all the States, and should 
not all the States be a help and a guide to each State? 
Louisiana's sugar drops into Ohio's tea-cup, and should 
not every palace built on the Fifth Avenue nod its head 
amicably to whatever cotton receipts its bills ? Over-pride 
of locality has been the scourge of our nationality. 



GREAT MEETING IN UNION SQUARE. 43 

When our thirty-one stars broke on tlie ^ orth Star, 
did not Texas as well as Pennsylvania light np the bleak 
arctic sky ? 

"When the old flag first rose over the untouched gold 
of California, did not Georgia and New York join hands 
in unveiling the tempting ore? 

Yirginia has seceded, and carried with it my political 
fathers, Washington and Jefferson. The State has allowed 
their tombs to crumble as well as their principles.' Out- 
law their sod ! Who will dare to ask me for my passport 
at the grave of Washington ? 



S3PEECH: 



WAK MEETING IN UNION SQUARE, 

JULY 15TH, 1862. 



Fellow-Citizens : 

In this hour of alienation, tumult, and disaster, no 
man, however humble, has a right to sit still when the 
nation has sprung to its feet, and the Union lies bleeding 
upon its back. 

We have come here in the darkest hour of national 
existence to declare before the world that the unity and 
nationality of America shall not be dissolved, either in the 
swamps of the Chickahominy or the Council Chambers of 
Paris or London. We are all, under moral martial law, 
now bound to obey every draft upon the brain, the heart, 
the purse, and the life, to serve a Government whose 
authority has dropped upon us with the gentleness of a 
flower, and yet shielded us with the strength of a giant. 
We may have our weaknesses, and these weaknesses may 
serve to point an English sneer, or round a Southern 
taunt ; but they never yet Lave succeeded in vitiating the 
grander points of our national character, neither have 



46 SPEECH AT THE 

tliey, for one moment, obstructed the beneficent action of 
our hitherto unassailable institutions. 

If secession is right, then all order, all regulated society, 
is wrong. If secession cannot be put down without war, 
then war is the highest duty and best business of the 
American citizen — more profitable than merchandise, 
more beautiful than poetry, and, for the time being, as 
sacred as the ministry itself. True, we may fail some- 
times ; so do aU business and sciences until experience 
teaches them. By degress we shall learn the art of blood, 
and mayhap the foe will find the Yankee shop-boy an 
efficient chronic portable slaughter-house. So far we have 
fouffht half tiser and half brother. I^o half man accom- 
plishes much. We must be all tiger now, that we may be 
all brothers by and by. 

If fevers and blunders have wasted the strength and 
tampered with the glory of our armies, the beautiful 
enthusiasm of this day's proceedings illustrates how 
heartily and abundantly we try to redeem our errors and 
relieve our heroes. Was it not a sublime spectacle to see 
the President of the United States pouring the balm of his 
sympathizing Presidential presence in the serried ranks 
of the wearied army of the Potomac — Abraham Lincoln 
confronting Geo. B. McClellan? The embodied repre- 
sentative of the national authority shaking hands with the 
genius of American safety — the great rail-splitter reproach- 
ing the railers against the noble army and its gifted 
chieftain. 

When Abraham Lincoln was nominated, I laughed at 
the convention ; when he was elected, I trembled for the 
country ; but since he has been inaugurated, I have learned 
to love and honor the man who has so faithfully wielded 
the national resources. When the South struck at the 
President, they fired at a man in the stocks, cooped up in 



WAR MEETING IN UNION SQUARE. 47 

judicial decisions, bound down by legislative restrictions, 
warned away from all pliilanthropic miscliief by tlie 
wliolesome liostility of an adverse popular vote. Tliey 
found him in quiet, helpless, party paralysis, and only left 
him an aroused, wounded, angry national giant, with all 
the resources of all parties at his command. 

The South sneered at our poor, under-fed, over-worked 
soldiers, who fled from Bull Run ; but now the world 
laughs at a whole community who ran away from a 
shadow. Our soldiers left a few arms and knapsacks on 
the field, while they threw away long years of happiness 
and prosperity. Daily are we taunted with their superior- 
ity in arms and birth. They claim Washington, as if 
their deeds had made him. Out of the 200,000 troops 
who fought in the War of the Eevolution, the South did 
not furnish 20,000. But for the E"orth, Washington 
would have gone down to posterity with a halter around 
his neck. It was Northern hands that moulded his 
Yirginia clay into an immortal statue. 

Compared with our solid successes, what have the South 
achieved in this war? Two or three land checks and one 
steam fright. The ghost of the Merrim,aG will haunt the 
nation for centuries. By diverting the base of operations 
from the James River, it has cost us $100,000,000. That 
sum would have built us 300 Monitors^ which would have 
blockaded all intervention. 

The march of events now means the march of armies. 
The progress of our institutions depends at last upon the 
speed of our bullets ; when they rain the Union is safe, 
when they slacken the Union reels. War is a cruel alter- 
native, but not more so than a peace which removes from 
danger without relieving us of disgrace, disorder, and 
disintegration. We want not lamentation over this war, 
but enlistments in the war. Let us shed no tears but 



48 SPEECH AT THE WAR MEETING IN UNION SQUARE. 

V 

volunteers. We cannot snceeed in this gigantic war until 
all classes are worked up to the thrusting point. 

There must be a fighting man from every family and 
every calling ; a fighting lawyer, a fighting doctor, a fight- 
ing priest, ay, and a fighting dandy. Kow is the time for 
wdiite kids to redeem themselves. Now is the time for all 
that army of fashionable loungers who have been growling 
all their lives for lack of opportunity. Now is the time 
for them to rise, strike and be immortal. While the South 
have sent a thousand men to battle, wg have sent a hun- 
dred. While they have mounted science to lead on their 
armies to victory, we have too often skipped experience 
and thrust politics on horseback to save the country. 
Twenty-three millions of people are tired of being told 
that they are outwitted because they arc outnumbered. 
If we fall now we will be the oddest ruin on record. 
Rome was four hundred years dying of her own corrup- 
tions. We, instead of being enervated by luxury or dis- 
comfited by invasion, go down with all our strength and 
all our wealth, and all our wits about us. Destroyed by 
a remark, our great light blown out by the passionate 
breath of partisan oratory. I, for one, can never believe 
in such a death. The ablest sword of the age is hanging 
by our side. The heaviest purse on the continent is in 
our pocket ; the noblest cause for which man can draw his 
brother's blood, calls him to the battle-field, and if we 
wait patiently and act vigorously the greatest victory of 
modern times is in our grasp — the victory of the Republic 
over itself, the victory of democrat virtues over aristocrat 
vices, the victory of law, order, and Government over dis- 
union, distraction, conflagration and damnation. 



SFEEOH 

ON' THE 

MILITAKY AND FINANCIAL POLICY OF THE 
NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 

IX THE 

LEGISLATURE AT ALBANY, 

JANUARY 23d, 1862. 



Me. Speaker : 

I ouglit, perliaps, sir, to apologize to the House for 
inflicting upon it, last week, a resolution whicli might 
seem inconsistent with the gravity and wisdom of this 
body. I should not, sir, have noticed the gentleman's 
resolution had it not represented the spirit of a class of 
croakers whose feverish officiousness has accomplished 
much mischief in the past and may attempt much more 
in the future. Towards the gentleman from New York I 
entertain, sir, a due regard. His position and worth 
entitle him to that regard. But, sir, my risibilities were 
too vigorously invoked to restrain me from demonstrating 
the absm-dity of his resolution by identifying him person- 
ally with its execution. I came to Albany, sir, in a civil 
capacity. Hoping to do my part in legislating for the 
best interests of the city and State of ISTew Y^ork, I brought 
with me only a few plain clothes, without cocked hat or 
regimentals. Croswcll's Manuel and not Hardee's Tactics 
4 



50 SPEECH IN THE 

was my guide. But, -sir, that gentleman's resolution, 
urging an aggressive movement by our army, supposes a 
thorough knowledge on our part of the propriety and 
possibility of such an advance, the preparations, capacity 
and completeness of all the elements composing that vast 
array of armed destructiveness. Certainly it implies, too, 
that all this formidable force is quiet only because we are 
silent; that it is waiting for our resolution to give itself 
resolution to advance. Sir, it resolves this body into a 
generalissimo of the army of the Kepublic — it constitutes 
the Legislature of the State the commander-in-chief of the 
national crisis — it substitutes popular impatience for the 
cautious combinations of scientific strategy. In theory it 
deposes the President — deposes the Secretary of "War — 
deposes the military plan of the campaign — deposes the 
common sense of the country, which is patiently awaiting 
the hour when the soldier's drill shall save the nation's life. 
George Washington, sir, was seven years emancipating 
a less extensive country, and with not half the foes to con- 
tend against. It took the combined forces of France and 
England ;three times the. period our army has been en- 
camped upon the Potomac to breach successfully a single 
fortress by the Black Sea. The Eichmond Examiner, I 
think, gives us the best practical solution of Gen. McClel- 
lan's inactivity. That partial journal declares that these 
Northern mudsills and cowardly assassins are by science 
and drill becoming rapidly transformed into veteran 
troops. What, sir, would be the momentous consequences 
of a move of that immense host if it should be defeated. 
Sir, the beautiful dream of our unity would be forever 
broken — the glorious volume of Constitutional history 
ignominiously closed; Europe clamorous for Southern 
recognition ; England imperative ; France jubilant ; the 
South a nation and we a by-word, laughed at by our own 



LEGISLATURE AT ALBANY. 51 

cliildreii and lorded over by all more fortunate contem- 
porary powers. The Congress of the United States is 
sitting within sound of tlie drum-beat of the American 
army and with its General in conference. Yet that Con- 
gress has not suggested an advance. The smoke of its 
thousand camp-fires intercepts the prospect of the White 
House, and yet its inmate urges no forward movement. 
Tlie resources of the country have been taxed to their 
utmost capacity in maintaining the gigantic struggle, yet the 
people are quiet. Though the banker has been attacked 
oftener than the traitor — though the sword has as yet only 
entered our financial sides and richly has gushed forth the 
golden blood — though it has neither reached the traitor's 
heart nor shivered the traitor's cause, yet capital is silent, 
because it knows how silently the forces for its redemption 
are accumulating — how calmly and completely leader and 
follower are learning their leaden lesson, so that victory 
may follow victory as regiment succeeds regiment steadily 
and brilliantly to the final consummation. 

I thought, sir, the " On to Richmond" cr}^ was dead. 
I thought it was choked in the death-rattle of its own 
victims. I thought it died with the shrieks of the dying 
at Manassas. Who shall bring back its dead ? Who 
shall live down its shame — the pride it wounded, the 
nations it shocked, the enemies it made, the money it lost ? 
Every home in America rocked under it. It sped the 
ball that shattered the heart of Cameron — it forged the 
iron that shackled the limbs of the noble Corcoran. 
Thousands of Northern heroes were hurried by it down to 
Southern dungeons, welcoming "famine, fevers, suffocation 
and despair, rather than walk forth in God's sunshine 
under the sacrilegious shelter of a Southern oath. 

Sir, I thought the " On to Eichmond " cry was dead — 
dead ! — buried under the tramp of six hundred thousand 



52 SPEECH IN THE 

drilling, loyal troops. I thought it was dead, sir, until 1 
saw it rise from the resurrection table of the 9th District. 
I hope, sir, that I appreciate that gentleman's patriotic 
anxiety for his country's success. I know how hard it is 
in these hard times to keep our national sympathies from 
overflownng the limits of State duties. Our bodies are in 
Albany, but our hearts are at Washington with a suffering, 
bleeding, but I hope not a sinking country. For God's 
sake let us be anxious, but not officious. We cannot save 
the nation by losing our patience or forgetting our duties. 
The civil relations of the Constitution suppose it the right 
and interest of the States to contribute advice as well as 
money in great national exigencies. Mutual co-operation 
and confidence, engendering mutual dependence and 
sympathy, tend to strengthen the bands that bind the 
State to the nation; but the genius of war when 
in action looks not for statesmanship to aim its iron 
blow. 

Its authority is exclusive and peremptory because its 
knowledge is peculiar, and the danger it is to master 
sudden, fearful, and relentless. Confronting no civil argu- 
ment, it can profit by no civil experience. If European 
rulers quell revolt more decisively, they are also less 
Innocent of the causes which provoke popular commotion. 
We may have committed errors in attempting to sui^press 
this rebellion, but have w^e not most righteously succeeded 
in destroying all arguments for its existence. When the 
history of this huge crime is written, the historian will find 
but one fault with the United States Government ; it was 
too angelic for the fiendish deviltry of the hour. There 
was one white head lately in the White House, who might 
have planned our deliverance. One trembling hand now 
withering in village obscurity which might have shut off 
this fiow of fraternal blood from the Ohio to the Gulf. 



LEGISLATURE AT ALBANY. 53 

Stopped it with his pen before lie wrote the Lecompton Mes- 
sage, stojjped it with his sword had he dropped it in time 
upon the defenceless fortifications. Shall yon and I throw 
a napkin over the dead body of that man's reputation ? 
And, sir, has it come to this ? In the 19th century, in the 
country of "Washington, in the age of universal suffrage, 
with all the elements of knowledge, w^ith all the imple- 
ments for its wide-spread diffusion, with a home to love, a 
church to warn and a ballot to protect us, the pride and 
progress of America has dropped into a cartridge-box. A 
voting and debating people have been obliged to place an 
eleven-inch columbiad in the chair to decide their differ- 
ences ? 

That animal appeal to which barbarians resort in the 
beginning, our enlightened humanity has been compelled 
to undertake at last. The brain of the nation has fled to 
its muscle for protection. Heaven seems to have decreed 
that our greatest blessings should be born of slaughter and 
contention — that the noblest aims which sanctify life 
should demand the greatest sacrifice of life. 'No great 
organic political principle, since the overthrow of the 
Philistines, has ever been settled without blood — the blood 
of the foreign foe in achieving the national independence ; 
the blood of the domestic traitor in repressing sectional 
ambition, and assuring the unity and concentration of 
national authority. Hence the alacrity with' which good 
men rush to righteous conflict. Hence the enthusiasm 
with which we have shivered the Peace Party, and care- 
fully packed away its broken crockery in Forts Warren 
and Lafayette. I yield to no man in sympathy for this 
war. Over my Democracy waves no white feather. 
There is nothing so poisonous as peace when a nation is 
going to pieces. There is nothing so healthy as blood 
when healthy things are to be bled for» There is no visitoi 



54 SPEECH IN THE 

V 

SO welcome as the crimson liquid whose vital flow shall 
stop the heart-beat of a nation's wrongs. 

On that dark and dreadful current, dethroned and dis- 
banded States must float back into the safe anchorage of 
American unity. Until this comes talk of peace ! 

You might as well arm a regiment with rosebuds to 
storm a battery, as attempt to drop peace into the rifled 
muzzle of this iron controversy. Like the conjurer who, 
by the firhig of his gun, revealed in all its beauty the 
diamond ring which had been crushed before our eyes, so 
shall the firing of the national musketiy restore the 
crumbling jewels of our nationality in all its priceless 
worth and purity. "While we feel all this, hope all this, 
and will aid all this, with our sympathies and resources, 
is it not wise in us to leave to the chosen national leaders 
the wielding of the national difiiculties? The local in- 
terests of the State are important enough to engross all our 
ofiicial time and energies. The recommendations of the 
Governor's Message alone would conscientiously occupy 
all the hundred days. There are the harbor defences to 
be completed. Henceforth advancing America marches 
armor-clad to her destiny. The gentle robe in which she 
has confidingly enclosed her strength is too fragile and 
perilous a garment to guard her life from the tragic pos- 
sibilities of universal selfishness. 

Unsuspectingly we have left unlocked our garden gates. 
Meaning no harm, we have believed in none. Invoking 
the love of all men, .we have invited all to enter and par- 
take of the rich fruits of this Western Paradise. 

Hereafter we confide less, and arm more. Southern 
treason has torn down the smile-embroidered curtain which 
concealed the gigantic proportions of European malignity. 

Yankee republicanism is a dangerous success. Yankee 
trade and Yankee ingenuity impertinent competition. IS"© 



LEGISLATURE AT ALBANY. 55 

state paper can argue down their criminality, unless Parrot, 
Minnie and Dalghren, obtrude tlieir gaping moutlis into 
tlie discussion. Strew these vigorous debaters, in prodigal 
profusion, along every shore, inlet, promontory, headland, 
or highway that faces the approach of the storm, and then 
a child may sit in the State Department and direct our 
foreign policy, with a scratch of its pen. A defenceless 
coast is a defenceless and paralyzing point in the wisest 
diplomacy. How morosely European statesmanship con- 
templates us because we will not announce our national 
death ; because we will not place our finger upon our pulse 
and say it has stopped ; because we will not permit trans- 
atlantic cupidity to measure our corpse and divide our 
assets. Did not a leading British Minister startle the 
world when he so intelligently instructed it, by declaring 
that we are fighting to gratify a lust for empire ? Had 
this " Star of Empire " consented to have crumbled into 
submissive asteroids, how the virtuous statesman would 
have recoiled in horror at these dollar-drowned, gain- 
loving, self-abased cravens. If the old ISTapoleon's flotilla 
at Boulogne had landed the Grand Army on Portsmouth 
beach would the lust of empire have marched the Cold- 
stream guards in double quick from London ? Are St. 
James's or Hyde Park any more England's household 
possessions than are Florida and Louisiana ours by right 
of material purchase, by intention of one theoretical and 
constitutional interlacino; of all interests, rio-hts and terri- 
tories, into that grand indivisible assimilation which we 
feel and know to be the great indestructible National 
American Unity ? Florida with all her swamps and 
alligators cannot break this charmed circle of States with- 
out detracting so much from my wealth and my power as 
the citizen of a guaranteed and unbroken national posses- 
sion. 



5Q SPEECH IN THE 

V 

New York witli all her elements of empire lias no option 
that releases her from the irrevocable contributions of her 
varied power to the common Union. Never can we stand 
as an equal before all nations unless we firmly insist upon 
the full proportions to which our nation's manhood has 
expanded. No government in the world is more interested 
in maintaining the ascendency of compact national author- 
ity over aspiring local dependencies than that of the 
British Empire. Unity is the source of all its political 
supremacy. Unloose these bonds and the charm of its 
invincibility vanishes. If former English statesmen could 
spend $1,500,000,000 to deter the theory of the French 
Revolution from reacting on the stability of the English 
throne, surely our 230sitiou should invoke the sympathy 
of all who are not merely interested in thrones, but what 
is far more important, the preservation of national life 
everywhere. When the dissolution of the Irish Union 
was discussed in the House of Commons, George Canning 
startled the whole British people with what was then 
thought to be the strongest historical argument that could 
be opposed to it, when he said, " What ! dissolve the 
Union ? Restore the Heptarchy ! " The ghosts of seven 
weakened and helpless kingdoms were artfully stalked in 
upon the debate to frighten down the logic of the opposition. 

I am not one of these who predict or prefer England's 
downfall. If there must be among nations, as there often 
is among families or sects, one master power of the world, 
England's supremacy is least detrimental to civilization. 
Her selfishness is grasping but her intelligence is refoTma- 
tory. She educated us to obey and then defy her. There 
is more merit in confusing her strength than lording over 
her decline. England knows that the loss of our unity is 
the only safeguard for the perpetuation of her supremacy. 
By degrees we are underselling her in all the markets of 



LEGISLATURE AT ALBANY. 57 

the world. Soon we sliall be tlie exclusive manufacturers 
for this continent. As long as slavery was a part of our 
united strength nothing could be so loathsome to British 
morality. But when the subjection of an inferior race 
became the means of destroying the rivalry of a kindred 
people, no fabled fairy every sprung suddenly upon a 
desolate moor so entrancing to the British gaze as the 
once deformed and degraded features of American Slavery 
rises out of the dreary contest. Thus we find England 
coaling disunion at her islands and shaking hands with it 
in her palaces. Yet at last we shall explode tlie diseased 
sophistry of Southern State Rights with one hand, while 
we brush with the other froiii the white foam of the 
Atlantic the dark monopoly of her imperious flag. 
Twenty-three millions of free compact invincible people 
have decreed it, and God Almighty will ratify it. Denuded 
of this morbid yearning for universal possession, Britannia's 
destiny is still a noble one. Let her civilize India, 
emancipate Ireland, and respect America. 

In connection with the great calamity of the hour, we 
are to consider the serious question of increased taxation. 
How to pay the expenses of national salvation. How to 
give up our money, in order to keep up our Government. 
Freedom from heav}'' taxation has been a crowning exulta- 
tion of American institutions. No nation ever embraced so 
many facilities for acquiring wealth, with s<3 little cost for 
its protection. It is no wonder that we have clutched iron 
blunderingly, when we have been so gorged with gold. 

If the war continues until July 1863, our debt will be 
$1,200,000,000. This includes all accrued, audited, or 
outstanding liabilities of every character. Now it is as- 
sumed that the property of the nation is worth $16,000,- 
000,000, and that we have in our immediate possession 
$10,500,000,000. So we part with less than one-tenth of 



58 SPEECH IN THE 

V 

what we possess and a little more than one-sixteenth of 
what we own to secure all that remains. Cannot this 
thrifty sum ensure the continuance of national existence ? 
"Why, sir, Lord Macaulay tells us that the Caliph Omar 
conquered all Asia on barley water — showered the wealth 
of twenty kingdoms among the crown jewels of the de- 
scendants of the Prophet. Allowing the greater expense 
in the outlay for implements of modern warfare, and the 
habit of extracting from our barley something stronger 
than water, shall we not bring under the plain bunting 
of the Union a more magnificient empire than ever bent 
to the red turban of the Infidel? Most of our debt abides 
with us, and is never really subtracted from the sum total 
of our possessions. Seven pei cent, interest upon the 
whole debt in '63 will be less than one per cent, upon all 
our available means now. Without allowing for the 
natural though of course diminished increase in the coun- 
try's resources then, if unforeseen difficulties sliould run up 
our total indebtedness to $2,000,000,000, the successful 
achievement of all we liave warred for and been taxed for 
would impart a prestige and inspiration to our position, the 
impetus of which would largely increase the facilities for 
liquidation. Now we are to raise by tax $150,000,000 for the 
ensuing year, to pay interest and civil and war ex^^enses 
then we could certainly raise $200,000,000, paying the in- 
terest on the whole debt, the current expenses of the Gov- 
ernment and giving us some $30,000,000 or $40,000,000 
annually to the sinking fund for the gradual extinction of 
both principal and interest. Since the beginning of the 
war we have saved $100,000,000 in imports and gained 
$30,000,000 on exports. This $100,000,000 of imports, em- 
ploying so many seamen and so much tonnage to freight 
them, are all diverted, more or less, into the expense and 
material of the war. It is fair to presume that 20,000,000 



LEGISLATURE AT ALBANY. 59 

of N^orthern people can wean five dollars a head on an 
average from their usual expenses to the service of the 
Government annually. The amount saved through 
economy and timidity, when brought out by tax laws, will 
almost pay the whole interest on the accumulatory debt. 
We buy one pair less of patent-leather boots, the difterence 
loads and fires a 64-pounder. The waste of war after all 
is not much greater than the extravagance of a prosperous 
peace. I doubt if there is much difference between the 
loss of money for balls which do not hit the enemy and 
the waste of purchased articles which do not benefit the 
individual. Almost all luxuries enervate, and destroy 
life. One 32-pounder costs $9 to fire it, this is not a 
greater total loss than G bottles of champagne uselessly 
rioted over. Tlie saving from toys, confectionery, bouquets, 
extravagant silks and laces, is simply a diversion of invest- 
ment to more iron, wood, coal and powder. A greater 
variety of investments, of course, diffuse more wealth — but 
there is not in this case so vast a disparity that we cannot 
tolerate it for a long time, contemplating the blessings at 
issue. The outlay for bread, clothing, and healthful 
luxuries and pleasures, in moderation, do not more benefit 
peaceful citizenship than the sacred expenditure of powder 
and shot to blow out of existence the disturbers of a bene- 
ficent government, benefit society everywhere. All 
discussion on this momentous question of revenue resolves 
itself into the form, and not the fact of acquiring it. Un- 
expired whiggery revels in the memory of the old inflation, 
and is delighted that the pressing necessities of the govern- 
ment rush to the legal tender of an unsupported treasury 
note issue. 

The old deposit-moving Andrew Jackson Democracy 
were alarmed to see the ancient cautious, pay-as-you-go 
policy, that so long ruled the country, now obliged to be 



60 SPEECH IN THE 

swept away by tlie awful tempest that prostrates all peace- 
framed precedents. N"ecessity puts finance as well as men 
under martial law. If money must be bad, tbe issue must 
come first, and. taxation come afterwards. 

As blood is tbe essential element of all animal life, so 
is taxation tbe golden life-stream tbat supplies tbe veins 
and arteries of all bealtby governmental action. But 
supply from taxation is slow, and exbaustion from war 
constant. Tbe gap between tbem tben must be bridged 
witb paper. In time of trouble gold, tbougb bard and 
enduring, is tbe first to fly from danger, and rusb timidly 
bebind bars and bolts, down into old stockings, and up into 
sly cbimney corners, leaving poor weak paper to equip 
armies, figbt battles, and save nations. Yet witb a willing 
and able nation, tbere is no excuse for a single dollar of 
paper not being followed up by a corresponding tax to 
meet it. I believe tbat tbe pressure of a bealtby public 
sentiment will be too great for our federal rulers to bazard 
tbeir good fame, by neglecting to tbrow immediate and 
substantial safeguards around an emergency that is so 
deeply to afi*ect tbe interests of ourselves and our posterity. 
Tax now, and tbe debt of our ebildrcn will not be wanton- 
ly increased by tbe necessity of paying interest on tbe 
principal borrowed to pay interest on tbe original principal. 
Tax now, and you check the temptation inherent in all 
public life and human nature to squander freely what is 
to be paid back indefinitely and to be watched indifferent- 
ly. Come on then, O tax. 

The journey of an Alpine traveller, though often ob- 
structed by the grand and dangerous chasms, is less fearful 
than the awful void of an empty treasury yawning before 
a nation marching to its own deliverance. 

When bankruptcy takes the field, famine drops the 
sword and valor yields the conflict. That pale hand 



LEGISLATURE AT ALBANY. 61 

stretched forth from the ghastly ranks, tells ns the soldier 
is there to strike, to bleed and die, but not to starve. 

Taxation is the l^ation's consent, spoken in gold. Let 
it flow freely from the long accumulations of plethoric 
peace. Leave nothing untaxed, that would boast its 
purchased share in the victory it shall secure. 

Tax the boots upon our feet, that we may walk forth 
more freely in this free land. Tax the handkerchief in 
our pocket, that it may help buy off as well as wipe off the 
tears that gush from our national troubles. Tax the lover's 
love letter, for no snowy bosom will he embrace more 
soft and nourishing than the gentle government that en- 
folds him. Tax the cradle of the sleeping infant, that the 
mother's foot may rock more safely the generation which 
is to be blessed by its fruits. Tax the communion-cup, 
for next to religion there is nothing so sacred to the heart 
of humanity as the Republicanism we would snatch fi'om 
desolation. 

Perhaps there is no levy we will be called upon to pay 
more interesting in its outlay than those ordinances of the 
JSTew York Common Council appropriating the first mil- 
lion at the commencment of the war. That money paid 
for the first drum-beat that called the loyal North to arms. 
It brought out the jaunty 7th and the sterling 71st and 
the heroic 69th and other armed heroes equally ready and 
devoted. 

We all remember the anxiety of friends for their 
safety — while they were ensuring the safety of the national 
Capitol. A part of this money had been expended for the 
support of the familes of those volunteers. The Comp- 
troller will soon stop payment for want of authority from 
this Legislature. Many of these poor families have in- 
cuiTed debt for necessary expenses, on the faith of these 
ordinances. Some arc shivering without fuel, and some 



62 SPEECH IN THE . 

are starving for want of bread, "wliile tlieir husbands and 
brothers are marcliing on everj battle-field, from Sliip 
Island to Harper's Feny, protecting the nation's coal and 
bread wherever it can be found. From the smoke of those 
battle-fields, through the dense forest of these gleaming 
bayonets, theji are looking into this Chamber to cheer 
their dark and bloody way, by invoking our aid to help 
their helpless friends. 

The Committee to whom was referred these ordinances 
will report upon them unanimously recommendatory, as 
soon as the authorized parties shall lay the proper vouchers 
and certificates before them. Besides all these pressing 
duties, we have banking interests to regulate, sanitary 
systems to organize, city charters to create and amend, 
and a thousand objects of legislation to accomplish, with 
only a few days to effect it, and we swim off into that vast 
sea of national politics, where looms a President, Cabinet 
and Congress to attend to these sworn duties. 

Look at the lobby that we have to watch — the bribery 
and coiTuption to punish and prevent. Sadly and surely 
it is becoming a disheartening question with high-toned 
citizenship whether, after all, it is worth pouring forth 
these thousands of millions, only to pass from heavy-armed 
treason to stealthy-stepping robbery. Everywhere the 
cry is, and the conviction is, that the virtue of the country 
is receding from politics. Little good men are turning 
their backs on the ballot-box, and great good men are 
turning their backs on the State House, and with their 
sense of duty and their hopes of humanity, retreating into 
less corrupting forms of usefulness. They are falling back 
on those inner intrenchments of liberty, the school, the 
church, the periodical press, the chair of learning, the farm 
and the home where politics come not, save to relent or 
expire, and where, higher than station, stronger than 



LEGISLATURE AT ALBANY. 63 

patronage, broods the calm, conservative spirit of moral 
power, wliicli although it shuns official power, and warns 
official power, shall yet save both State and office from 
threatened absorption by sophist, knave or demagogue. 
Sliould not such reflections invoke a sterner sense of moral 
and legislative obligation, and admonish us that our best 
military manoeuvre is to fall back from Washington and 
McClellan on New York and the Knights of the Shoddy 
and the Lobby. Let us leave the question of the poor 
war prisoners in the righteous hands of President Lincoln, 
wliile we attend to the prisoners that are to be taken at 
home. 

Our mission is to strike down I^orthern rogues, while 
others are preparing to charge Southern traitors : when 
both are extinguished, let us disappoint croaking Europe 
by beginidng anew the beautiful efibrt of a purer, wiser 
and more harmonious self-firovernment. 



V 



SI^EECH 



CELEBRATION OF THE ANNIVERSARY 
OF THE GREAT UPRISING IN APRIL, 

1861, 

DELIVERED AT MADISON SQUAKE, 

APEIL 20Tn, 1863. 



Fellow Citizens : 

Would to God I could call yon all fellow-soldiers ! 
Would tliat my oratory was bright enough to braid every 
plain coat here into the livery of the national army. 
Would that the breath expended on so many speeches 
could waft all these mass meetings into mass regiments 
for the field, where duty and safety demand them. 

There is no star that shoots in beauty along the mid- 
night sky, so reverently gazed upon as the passing soldier, 
who flits through the darkness of his country's fortunes 
to the scene of her glory and her salvation. Is that 
soldier rude and illiterate ? the wisdom of Hamilton and 
Jeflerson is crying to him for help. Is he poor and un- 
fortunate ? the fortunes of this great Republic have been 
swept into his camp for safety. 

Will sneers and copperhead badges redeem us ? If 
this war is wrong, where will you search creation for a 
5 



66 SPEECH ON ANNIVERSARY 

righteous conflict? Because dainty editors dislike' or 
distrust some who participate in these " Loyal Leagues," 
shall we be dumb before the tliousands who come here 
with beating hearts to cheer and strengthen their love of 
country ? I do not say that this meeting will capture 
Richmond or sink the Alabama, but surely the enthusiasm 
evinced on the resolutions announced, and the strong 
names associated with so much persistent determination, 
must have its weight on those who are looking for divi- 
sions here, as the last hope of a fading heresy whose props 
are Northern blunders and Southern shinplasters. Do 
we not almost hear our enemies exclaim, Ah, those 
Yankees ! their gold is at 150 in the war, but their pulse 
is at 200 for the war. 

The balls hurled at Fort Sumter two years ago, did 
they shiver a principle or only a parapet ? 

The first trigger pulled on this nation, asked America 
this iron question, " "Will ye go forward with Lincoln, or 
backward with Beauregard ? Will ye cling to the unity 
and safety of an invincible empire, or will ye accept the 
poisonous sophistry of a Southern construction of consti- 
tutional duty, and dwindle away into the frivolous frag- 
ments of a helpless, diluted, and indefinitely dissolving 
destiny?" 

Is self-destiTiction so obviously a national duty, that 
England frets and Kichmond foams because we will not 
embrace it, because with a scratch of the pen, we wdll 
not proclaim that the pen itself has failed in Govern- 
ment ? 

This right of sufi'rage, so grand, so safe, so simple, so 
soothing to American pride, so helpful to American inter- 
ests, was it not our boast, that it provided a remedy for 
all our troubles ; that it gave thought the victory over 
arms for evermore ? 



OF GREAT UPRISING. 67 

"VVliat right, then, had the sixth of November to strike 
the fourth of March until it reeled, and the Inaugural al- 
most became the Requiem of the Republic ? 

Two years ago you answered these questions with 
armies as well as arguments. Then capital sprang to its 
feet and cried, Here^is my gold, take it, and restore the 
golden circle of the States. Then patriotism sprang to 
its arms, exclaiming, Here is my life, take that, too, only 
preserve the principle which gives to all our lives in- 
creased dignity and happiness. 

So far your resolve was a hope, now it is an experience 
— the experience of development as well as of disappoint- 
ment; the experience of errors often reformed, and as 
often repeated ; the experience of a Government fighting 
for liberty, and yet not always careful of liberty ; the 
experience of some triumph, some defeats, and many 
tears. "We have lost friends, lost treasure,;>lost battles ; 
but when the smoke of the contest cleared away, the 
world looked in vain to find our courage and our perse- 
verance lying among the killed and w^ounded. ISTo raid, 
however clever, has been able to cut us off from those 
supplies. 'No capture so extensive as to parole our de- 
termination to succeed. 

Are we fighting merely to recover so much population, 
jurisdiction and territory ? Is the community we would 
reclaim so very amiable as to justify this awful outlay? 
Has not the sugar-cane we would lose, soured more than 
it has sweetened our tempers ? Does not the cotton that 
seceded inflame our politics quite as much as it warms 
our backs ? 

We insist upon the old Union simply because the 
principle upon which the South destroys it, makes any 
other union impossible. In the progress of the war we 
are apt to forget the purposes of the war. We go before 



68 SPEECH ON ANNIVEKS^RY 

tlie world upon tlie issue that as we came together by 
convention, we can only part by convention ; that as it 
required more than a minority to make the compact, it 
takes more than a minority to break the compact. 

The South may wrest from us ten thousand leagues 
of temtory, capture $1,000,000,000 worth of i:)roperty, 
and destroy a million of men, and it would be nothing to 
plundering us of the principle, that the majority must 
rule. It is the only prop and hope of free government 
anywhere. This is the great crime of the crash. 

If I was a Democrat before the war, trying to prevent 
the war, how should I insult that Democracy now by em- 
barrassing a contest upon which depends the preservation 
of democratic institutions — where our success is all that 
can save us from a blotted name, a broken country, and 
a threatening neighbor. Who says that the real Demo- 
cratic party are opposed to this war ? Has it not taken 
the lead in all our wars — the war of 1812, and the Mexi- 
can war ? "Was it not foremost to defend the position 
that almost led to war on the Maine boundary, the Ore- 
gon territory and. French indemnity question? Has it 
not won half its popularity by its bold attitude in our 
foreign relations? and wall it play into foreign hands 
now ? will it be found raffling for a goose in the coal-hole 
while the house is falling over its head? Let not the 
hatred of Eepublicans embarrass the safety of the Eepub- 
lic, or the loss of power cause us to jeopardise the very 
existence of power. 

If it be true, as is alleged, that the Eepublicans blun- 
dered in bringing on the war, and blundered in carrying 
on the war, shall the Democrats blunder in opposing a war 
that, in spite of all Abolitionism, is to restore the consti- 
tution and the Grovernment I know they reverence ? Their 
best blood is in the army, and their best brain is on the 



OF GREAT UPRISING. 69 

stump for tlie war. Where the king is, there is the court. 
And where the best Democrats are, there is the Demo- 
cratic part J. "With all its faults, that party has been the 
glory of the past ; with all its responsibilities, it will not 
be the shame of the future. 

Where does the peace Democrat see the least prospect 
of an honorable peace without successful war ? 

Does he see it in the hopeless unanimity of Southern 
misapprehensions and malignity ? Does he see it by tlie 
light of the burning merchantman on the lonely ocean ? 
Does he see it in the sneers of the Southern leaders at the 
efiorts of the IlTorthern peace party ? 

If they want peace, let them drop their arms and 
melt back their angry cannon into church bells, to ring 
them again to the holy worship of the Union. 

If the South have any grievances against the Federal 
Government, they will iind at last, after all their prowess 
and victories, that the civil was more effectual than the 
military remedy. 

If after the war the people choose to call a convention, 
and in that convention decide, and the people constitu- 
tionally rafify that decision, that certain States may 
secede, then we would say, Go willingly, because 3'ou go 
legally. But if the convention and the j^eople decide 
that they shall not go, then not all their forces, aided by 
the ships of England and the armies of ISTapoleon, with 
the ghost of his uncle at the head of them, shall wrest one 
State or one foot of earth from the Union of our fathers. 
Let Earl Russell and the gracious lords of neutrality 
remember that this vast war and all its immense imple- 
ments of destruction — in spite of all blockades, all Eman- 
cipation, Confiscation and Conscription Acts — in spite of 
cavalry and itifantry, of Monitors and fifteen-inch guns — 
all are simply to give a harmless piece of paper a chance 



70 SPEECH ON ANNIVERSARY 

\ 

to perform its usual election office of eighty years' stand- 
ing, from the lakes to the gulf. Notwithstanding all the 
English sneers about the lust for empire, and the despo- 
tism of Fort Lafayette and suspended habeas cor])us — in 
spite of the disease of camps and marches, the vast stretch 
of army movements, the slaughter at Corinth and Fred- 
ericksburg — all are only ghastly highways to the filling 
of a few empty chairs in the National Capitol Avith plain 
citizens, and to entrust them with the rights and privileges 
of sovereign power. 

This whole war is simply the paying of two thousand 
millions for Southern mileage to the capital. I admit it 
is a high rate of passage-money, but we intend to pay it, 
and to insist upon their presence. Are we not execrable 
Unionists, oh ! plunderers of Ireland ! oh ! torturers of 
India ? 

We have come here to strengthen ourselves at the 
fountain of our first determination. The conflict we 
resolved on two years ago Avith such thoughtless enthusi- 
asm must now be carried on in the calm of thoughtful, 
inflexible perseverance. 

At first the war was a holiday sensation — novel, blood- 
less and exhilarating, with no defeats, no tears, and few 
taxes to disenchant us. Now this anniversary of the great 
uprising is shining on our bloody hands, our weeping 
homes, our wrangling words, our growing debts, our 
blundering deeds — shining down into the dark bosoms of 
a patient, suffering and bewildered people, and touching 
us all with a deeper conviction of how much we have 
gained in possessing "Washington, how much we have lost 
in forgetting him ! The spell of empire broken, the sense 
of safety shaken, the pride of power wounded, the hopes 
of progress checked, the desolation of America the oidy 
birthday gift to the savior of America on the anniversary 



OF GREAT UPRISING. 71 

of liis coming ! It is well that the spirit of such a memory 
should waylay our descending fortunes, and lift us, if but 
for a moment, above the snappish policies, the wild phi- 
lanthropy, the tempting contracts and the sinking char- 
acter of our country, into kindred elevation and instruc- 
tive communion with him who loved all sections, saved 
all sections, and warned all sections, how much we must 
do and undo, how much we must bear and forbear, if we 
would remain a peaceful, helpful, united commonwealth. 
A business people have been nearly destroyed by not 
minding their own business; a practical people almost 
engulfed in a theory — the theory at the North that it was 
necessary to make laws in order to keep slavery out of the 
Territories— the theory of the South that it was necessary 
to break laws in order to carry slavery into the Terri- 
tories. From the heights of our own united follies these 
dark blunders are now shelling each other. 

Yet with all our faults of peace in the past, and all 
our faults of war in the present, war is the great virtue 
of the hour — the costly, ghastly, battle-stained business 
of American duty, from whose ferocious investment in 
bones and powder shall come forth the return profits of 
State fidelity, national security and general prosperity. 

A people who have stretched over a vast continent, 
and settled the borders of two oceans, are not to be 
stopped by a wooden stake in Charleston' channel. If 
nine Monitors are insufficient to reduce that stronghold, 
nine hundred Monitors must. If we cannot blow them 
out, smoke them out, nor starve them out, we must wear 
them out by the prompt and ceaseless pressure of the 
national retribution. Washington was seven years found- 
ing a nation, and can we expect Abraham Lincoln to save 
it in less than half that time ? The British people bore 
the blood and taxes of twenty years of war to assert the 



72 SPEECH ON ANNIVERSARY 

right to meddle with their neighbors on the continent, 
and shall we be disheartened by a two years' conflict to 
maintain our own existence? We are not fighting the 
distant Englishman, nor the degenerated Mexican, nor 
the poor, fading Indian, but a daring, dreadful and defiant 
Anglo-Saxon equal, with our knowledge in his head, our 
blood in his veins, our glory in his history, our God re- 
ceiving his oath, and our West Point pointing his gun. 

This is a war of resources more than of genius — of so 
much material hurled against so much other material; 
and he who hurls most will live longest. 

The great truth that underlies the contest must be 
some compensation for the lack of great victories and great 
commanders. As all of us helped to build up the E-epub- 
lic, so is it to be saved by the strong arm, long j)urse, and 
clear heads of the united masses. Thus far our greatest 
general has been our general greatness. If pride is the 
most sensitive of human passions, the wise man's pride of 
institutions, and the strong man's pride of muscle, are 
deeply involved in this contest. Will the northern youth, 
who glories in his manly strength and pluck, let history 
record that he was overcome by foemeu not half so nu- 
merous? Will the student, or the statesman, whose study 
of other nations only makes them turn more fondly to 
their own self-adjusting system — will they see their beau- 
tiful ideal dissolve like a dream, and not stretch forth a 
hand to save it ? Will the merchant, who has kept his 
faith in the great contract, consent to lose his share in a 
bargain that acknowledges him joint owner of a thousand 
leagues of territory ? Will the northern laborer, whose 
toil and sweat are at this moment paying for the purchase 
of Louisiana, Texas, and Florida, cry out for a j^eace that 
robs him both of his money and his country ? Eight 
inches of every foot of land in those States were paid for 



OF GREAT UPRISING. 73 

by a Yankee invasion of brains and dollars. And when 
we marcli to the protection of our own possessions, and 
to enforce obedience to our own existing laws in our own 
country, and to the fulfillment of our own oath and life- 
long habit of jurisdiction and authority, that is the com- 
ing of the invader. And for what purpose do we march ? 
To subjugate. Subjugate who and what ? Subjugate 
our southern brethren to be our equals in everything. 
Subjugate the meanest of their people, by recognizing his 
right to the chance of being our President and ruling over 
us, our General and commanding us, our Judge and con- 
demning us, our legislator, and help shape our vast inter- 
ests and resources. This is the yoke the South are said 
to be living on half rations to avoid. This is the subjuga- 
tion the masses of Europe would wade through seas of 
blood to enjoy. 

Flora McFlimsey with a house full of clothes had 
" nothing to wear." And the spoiled South, with all the 
richest privileges of the Constitution strewn in profusion 
around her, drops in scorn the starry mantle of her free- 
dom and her glory, and waits with haughty impatience 
for Paris and London to wrap around her the later and 
flimsier robes of intervention. 

That millenium of southern hopes has its realizations 
as often adjourned as the Millerites' predictions of the 
destruction of the earth. When such a day of peril comes, 
it will be but a new form of American investment, in con- 
flict, suff'ering, and final success. If England will only 
wait till we complete the implements for her reception, 
then Seward and Palmerston may roll up their polished 
platitudes, and Ericsson, Dahlgren, and Armstrong un- 
limber the crashing diplomacy that is to fight out the 
great question of who shall be the master nation. 

In yonder window sits the spirit of our past victories. 



74 SPEECH ON THE GREAT UPRISING. 

v 

His form is crumbling, liis sun is setting, his liglit will 
lead our armies to no more triumphs. As he gave his 
youth to England's punishment, and cradled his renown 
on England's discomfiture, it may be that his last days 
shall yet behold the grasping selfishness of this twice-chas- 
tised power again humbled before a reconciled, indignant, 
and irresistible America. 



A-DDRESS 



PRESIDENTIAL CRISIS, 

DELIVERED AT THE COOPER INSTITUTE BEFORE THE TTAE DEMOCRACY, 

NOVEMBER 1ST, 1864. 



[Maj.-Genekal Sickles having concluded his speech, after waiting 
for the subsidence of the tumultuous enthusiasm \vith which the 
patriotic and eloquent victim of the war was greeted,] 

Mr, CoDDiNGTON lose and addressed the assemljlj. 
Fellow Citizens : 

I FEEL the disadvantage of succeeding a hero. I bring 
with me no deeds and no wounds to sanctify these verbal 
contributions to the exigency. We lose our hearts with 
those who lose their limbs for a cause that clmnot be lost'' 

In this ghastly crisis of our broken and bereaved 
America, a patient, suffering, and bewildered people are 
anxiously asking each other, in whose ballot is wrapped 
the honor and safety of the nation, which ticket will admit 
us to the theatre of a restored and renovated common- 
wealth ? Does the angel of redemption beckon to us from 
the platform at Chicago or Baltimore ? almost the exact 
distance between self-destruction and self-government. ^ 



76 ADDEESS ON THE 

v 

"While tlie tempest is sweeping away old party obliga- 
tions and raining down upon ns new duties, sliall we, as 
Democrats, drop helplessly into the flood, tied to the dead 
body of an organization whose anti-democratic conduct 
and anti-American spirit, would only entail upon us ridi- 
cule, degradation, and suicide? Had the Democratic 
Party braced themselves up to the heroic height of the 
difficulty ; had they grafted the pluck of the ballot on the 
bravery of the bayonet, by insisting, without an "if" or 
a " but," upon the inviolability of the national unity ; had 
they joined issue with the administration upon mere ques- 
tions of administration, going before the country with 
different candidates, to vindicate the same national prin- 
ciples, asking a verdict of the people uj)on the propriety 
or improj^riety of test oaths, upon the question of a sounder 
financial policy for the war, upon a more careful suspension 
of the habeas corpus, upon the best mode of reconstructing 
States and ameliorating acts of confiscation, so that the 
South might not pass from a slaughter-house to an alms- 
house, so that we might bind up the broken links of our 
common brotherhood with discrimination as well as deter- 
mination ; had they planted one foot on the crimes of the 
South and the other upon the faults of the administration, 
and said : " Here we stand, this is our platform, we will 
punish the one and avoid the other ; " such an opposition 
would have been seasonable, healthful, and perhaps suc- 
cessful. Party men and no party men, discontented 
Republicans and contented Democrats, all could have 
joined heartily, because safely, in so legitimate an an- 
■ tagonism. Do not the virtues of the war and the vicissitudes 
of the war admonish us to remember that while both 
parties are falling and dying upon the same bloody field, 
struck down by the same dark hand, for the same bright 
cause, both parties should adjourn their less urgent differ- 



PRESIDENTIAL CRISIS. 77 

ences and unite upon the one fearful overshadowing neces- 
sity, so that citizen and soldier, partisan and patriot, 
Republican and Democrat, hand in hand, thoughtfully as 
well as pugnaciously, we may snatch from this gory 
hurricane of righteous conflict the sweet sugar-cane of 
perpetual peace ? 

We sympathize, naturally, with Abraham Lincoln. 
We appreciate the awful magnitude of his trials and 
temptations, his danger and his duties. We thank God 
that a Scotch cap saved the American Cap of Liberty 
from sudden and sacrilegious spoliation. We know how 
eagerly a jealous o]3position have been w^atching him to 
make capital out of the blunders and losses of this war, in 
order to obtain that power which their own blunders lost. 
An executive without experience, without the larger range 
of statesmanship to grasp so comprehensive a calamity, is 
suddenly called upon to thrust out his village hands to 
catch a falling empire. 

I defy any man, even l^apoleon himself, to pass 
instantaneously from an Illinois lawyer to a Washington 
Commander-in-Chief without committing grave errors. 
Has his policy prolonged the war? Which prolongs war 
most, the McClellan theory that returns to the enemy 
the live ammunition of a working negro, or the Lincoln 
programme that keeps the African and hurls back only 
the avenging sweep of musket and mortar? Did he lay 
his hand on the military elements? Just in time for 
Presidential common sense to save Chickahominy strategy 
from losing Washington. Who doubts now if McDowell 
had reported for duty on the Peninsula, Stonewall Jackson 
would not have thought it his duty to file up Pennsylvania 
avenue ? Has the President sanctioned arbitrary arrests ? 
So did Washington and Jackson; so must all rulers who 
would save a State in danger. Where one innocent person 



78 ADDKESS ON THI. 

lias suffered, a hundred guilty ones have escaped. Does 
he favor acts of confiscation ? The South have confiscated 
every Northern thing, from a pin to a principle. Has he 
uttered the fearfal word " Emancipation ? " It was a 
trumpet in the storm calling all hands on deck to save the 
ship. When the storm subsides the pen will shape into 
consistent proportions the security and humanity of the 
republic. There must always be a despotism in the Con- 
stitution to meet the dangers of the Constitution. If the 
beautiful charter cannot defend itself, it is merely a pass- 
ing remark, instead of a reliable instrument. Accustomed 
only to the practice of its peaceful provisions, we forget 
that it is not merely a temple in which to worship and 
administer, but an arsenal to load and fire. The war 
power of the Constitution — the right to suspend habeas 
corpus, to raise and support armies — is an awful recogni- 
tion of the necessity for despotism in danger; not a wanton 
and reckless employment of force, but an effective and 
peremptory use of power to meet sudden and perilous 
emergencies. I do not say that Mr. Lincoln has always 
wielded this power judiciously. Yet, if there is but one 
person in the crowd who will save my life from an assassin, 
I will not stay his arm to criticise his character. If we 
cannot endorse his errors we may at least adjourn their 
accountability. We looked around in vain at this election 
for any one else to strike such blows for the Union as 
Abraham Lincoln. The extremest war feeling is in power 
at the South, and the extremest war feeling must be in 
power at the North, or there is no equality in the energy 
that wields our respective resources. Moderation and 
compromise are strength in peace ; they are weakness in 
war. The South mean every means of destruction ; and 
if we mean less we will gain less than we are fighting for. 
Mr. Lincoln is a long man, but he is the shortest cut to 



PRESIDENTIAL CRISIS. 79 

the enemy. If we mean war we must vote for him. We 
opposed Abraham Lincohi in 1860, becanse he was on]y 
the available candidate of what seemed then a still more 
unavailable party ; but the flood of insurrection in 1864 
has swept him upon the Ararat of the argument, and the 
Chicago party have made his election the onl}- test of true 
citizenship. You cannot inflict upon the Southern crime 
so severe a Presidential punishment as the re-election 
of Abraham Lincoln. Whatever that guilty community 
have suflered, of desolation or slaughter, of weeping homes 
or broken hearts, have fallen upon them in streams of 
national retribution, poured from the chartered hand oi 
Abraham Lincoln. When you re-elect him you re-elect a 
restless chastening rod — ^you re-elect the unbroken and 
uncompromising march of the sovereign supremacy. 

Few men could have carried this Government through 
such a conjuncture without committing errors enough to 
have insured the success of any opposition, candidly and 
patriotically marshalled. Unfortunately for us, unwisely 
for them, the Democratic leaders have so shaped the 
canvass that we dare not change our rulers for fear of 
changing our institutions. Vitiated by long habits of 
political intrigue, they judged the popular intelligence 
from their own degenerate stand-point. Because the 
people asked for reform, they thought they would bear 
revolution ; because some were willing to accept an im- 
provement on Abraham Lincoln, they imagined it a good 
time to administer a platform dissolved in this weak decoc- 
tion of Yallandigham, Jefl". Davis, and Benedict Arnold. 
The American people are a people of sentiment. They 
are gazing down into the profoundest depths of this ques- 
tion. As surely as the springs of the earth are gushing 
pure and sweet beneath the blood of battle, just so sure, 
under all the horrors of war, do we behold the refreshing 



80 ADDRESS ON THE 

V 

streams of future order, stability, and peace. The Amer- 
ican people are also a business people. They have esti- 
mated the profits and losses of this war ; they have dropped 
in one scale the tears, the graves, the debts, the taxes, the 
crippled limbs, the ruined homes, the demoralized habits, 
and the depreciated constitutions ; and in the other scale 
they have placed the unity, the progress, and the prosperity 
of America ; and they know how such profits outweigh all 
its losses. They see rising from the crimson mist a firmer, 
securer nationality, no longer at the mercy of the sophist 
or the conspirator, just as restricted, but more respected 
of all States and nations. They see, too, the States — 
always inviolate within their just sphere — no longer, with 
an arrogant intrusiveness, aspiring to unsettle the grander 
guardianship of the nation. If Abraham Lincoln is the 
tyrant and imbecile they call him, the Democratic Party 
had a great card in their hands, and the people will hold 
them responsible for trifling with the crisis and throwing 
away the game. 

If the President is weak, better a weak man with a 
strong cause than an indifferent man with no cause at all. 
Professing to be horrified at the usurpations of the 
administration, the Chicago party have left the people no 
alternative but to liold on to Mr. Lincoln, or give up the 
country. What kind of a country is it which elects the 
Chicago ticket? A majority of the people will then have 
decided that the principle of obedience to the will of the 
majority can no longer be maintained; that it failed by 
peace in 1860 ; that it has failed by war in 1864. Elect 
that ticket, and you elect a laugh at our own arrogance, 
imbecility and cowardice ; you elect an acknowledgment 
that eight millions of people, armed with an impracticable 
sophistry are too much for twenty millions, backed by the 
eternal truths of republican faith and national sovereignty. 



PRESIDENTIAL CRISIS. 8i 

Oh ! bnt"McClellan's letter is sound on the war. When 
was the Democratic machine ever stopped by a letter ? 
Franklin Pierce's inaugural declared that the slavery 
question should never be revived during his administration, 
and in-one year the land was wild with the repeal of the 
Missouri Compromise. James Buchanan made a similar 
declaration, and the blast from Kansas almost blew out 
the light of the republic. 

" Union," writes McCIellan, " is the one condition of 
peace," ah! but what Union ? The Union that appeases 
Southern hostilities by surrendering to Southern dogmas 
about States doing as they like, or the Union. that insists 
lirmly on a firmer adherence to national obligation's ? He 
dare not tell us which Union he means, and we dare not 
trust him without knowing. 

..Besides, a scratch of the pen does not prove a man. 
A campaign letter is not a candidate's character. If you 
want to know McClellai], you must find out Ins habits of 
thought and feeling. "Who are his friends ? What are his 
associations and surroundings ? They make the man, not 
electioneering words. The very virtues of the individual 
would be the vices of the administration. Th^ men who 
made McCIellan are heart and sonl with the South. If he 
is grateful, he will be true to them, and so, false to the 
country. Elect the Chicago ticket, and the Democratic 
Party will tell you that the people have decided in favor 
of negotiation. You know, and I know — and all the 
world knows — that success in negotiation depends on suc- 
cess in war. The South will say to your commissioners, 
" We went to war for our independence — you went to war 
to prevent it. You have been throwing shot and shell 
upon us for three years and a half without our crying 
enough. If your war is a failure ours is a success, and we 
demand the fruits of it — the acknowledgment of our inde- 
6 



82 ADDRESS ON THE 

V 

penclence." "What other guaranties could jou. give them '• 
They have had everything but this acknowledgment: 
The Republican Congress of 1861 unanimously guaranteec 
slavery in the States, and refused to disturb it in organizint 
new Territories. If the South wanted more at the com 
mencement of the war, in God's name, what will the} 
demand w^hen you have pronounced that war a failure? 

McClellan could give them no more than Lincoli 
offered them through the first eighteen montlis of the con 
flict. He gave them back their negroes ; he guaranteec 
them every right under the Constitution, and what wa^ 
the answer? More armies to invade us, more pirates tc 
burn our helpless merchantmen, more importunities foi 
foreign aid to co-operate against us, and if these fail, the 
last ditch more welcome than the temple of Washington. 
General McClellati in repeating Mr. Lincoln's past is only 
walking through the canvass in that gentleman's old boots. 
If elected, backing his car on the worn-out rails of 1861 
and 1862, to end where the colonies began, amid the con- 
fusion and anarchy of aboriginal conflicts. 

John Van Buren, in a speecli at Hudson, told the 
people that Mr. Lincoln with his emancipation policy, had 
perverted the objects of the war. More than a year ago, 
on Madison Square, ho declared slavery deserved its doom. 
Before the war that prophetic politician informed the 
North if secession took place it would be only a holiday 
task for us to go South and reannex them without shivery. 
Where are we to place a ticket w^ith such summersault sup- 
porters ? Here is one of the original founders of the later 
anti-slavery party going about the country denouncing his 
own offspring. Are not eighteen months long enough to 
play with w^ar, fritter away our strength and jeopardise 
our existence? Depend upon it, a people who could fire 
on a President struck witli the paralysis of judicial and 



PRESIDENTIAL CRISIS. 83 

congressional restrictions, drop two houses of Congress, 
throw away a supreme judicial bench, turn their backs 
upon a popular vote ready to sweep them again into 
power — a people who have emptied their hands of all these 
blessings that they might tear up tlie foundations of 
American prosperity, and float their ruins in the heart's 
blood of the North — such a people are not to be brought 
back by an armistice, but on a stretcher. 

jN^ever but once have the citizens of the North voted 
directly upon the slavery question, and then they gave an 
overwhelming majority for Southern rights. In the contest 
of 1852, the Fugitive Slave Law and the Compromise of 
1850, were almost the only questions before the people ; 
yet every Northern State, but two, voted solid for the 
South. That was the real test of Northern feeling for 
Southern slavery under the Constitution. In 1856 the 
large vote of Fremont was neither for the woolly iiorse 
nor for the woolly head, but the recoil of a business people, 
from the breach of contract in the repeal of the Com- 
promise of 1820. The election of Mr. Lincoln was a judi- 
cial verdict against the corruption of politicans and the 
wiles of conspirators under the Buchanan administration. 
The anti-slavery vote was not the increase of anti-slavery 
feeling ; but the people driven into the anti-slavery I3arty, 
as the only organized means of breaking down depraved 
statesmanship, corrupted by the slave ])ower. France has 
been called a monarchy, modified by songs ; Russia a des- 
potism, tempered with assassination; and is not the 
American republic a democracy, checked, not Chicagoed, 
by watchful minorities? The great distinction between 
despotism and democracy is, that in the first, the minority 
is dominant and stationary; in the last it is patient, sub- 
ordinate and fluctuating. The minority of to-day, fresh 
from communion with the people, may be the majority of 



84 ADDRESS ON THE^ 

to-morrow, administering their sympathies in the govern- 
ment; and the majority, relieved of the elevation and 
importance of official life, go back to renew and strengthen 
their affections with the people. Thus the system har 
monizes, power rotates, and the republic is safe. Great 
benefits are sometimes in the minority, and great evils 
often in the majority, but with a little patience they 
inevitably change places. No man in this Union ever 
advocated a policy or a party that was not at some time or 
another in power. And no man or party has a right to 
rebel against a principle whose alternating possibilities 
may ensure their return to power. 

First it is Biddle's bank, then Benton's hard currency, 
Massachusetts' tariff and South Carolina's free trade, anti- 
liquor, anti-rent and Know-Nothing, "Wilmot proviso, and 
Dred Scott decision, each by turn swearing in their hobby ; 
and last to come — and yet to last always — Emancipation 
— poor, wild-eyed, closet-ridden fanaticism. Constitution- 
ally, pertinaciously despised abolitionism ! Alternately 
the fanatic's dream and the politician's grave, the states- 
man's crime and the nation's goal. Humanity driven into 
a corner, reduced to a seventy years' whisper, started to 
its feet by the cannon of Davis, and floated by the blood 
of both JSToi-th and South into the fireside possession of 
every slaveholder or hater in this serf-banished land. 

Negotiation means nothing now imless it means inde- 
pendence out of the Union, or insubordination in the 
Union. It means a foreign power built upon the ruins of 
our domestic hearth-stones or the whole republic, with the 
vital element of all republicanism gone — obedience to the 
will of the majority; Union, with the principle of unity 
dissolved; and when that dies, who will calm the jarring 
States? What will give us dignity and consideration 
abroad ? Where, then, is the great republic ? What, 



PRESIDENTIAL CRISIS. 85 

then, do you mean by an American citizen ? Because one 
party favored the African, must all parties give up this 
beautiful Anglo-Saxon America ? Because the Constitu- 
tion reserved to the States powers not necessary to the 
General Government, shall those powers which are neces- 
sary, and which it did. delegate to the General Govern- 
ment, be at the mercy of tlie sophistry or the iniquity of 
any State which imagines somebody at some time intends 
to injure them ? 

What do we mean by State sovereignty and State 
pride? The States are spontaneous communities, born of 
the accidents of migration and settlement. The Union is 
the deliberate act of the best wisdom of all the States. 
The national power is so much of State rights surrendered 
to protect the rest. And the States that strike at the 
nation strike at tlie rights of the States that make the 
nation. A citizen is born in South Carolina, raises cotton 
in Alabama, and dies in California. His cradle is rocked 
under one jurisdiction, his pocket iilled or emptied by 
another, and his coffin lowered in a third ; but he is alwa^^s 
in the Union — that most continuous, overshadowing and 
comprehensive home, into which reach his loftiest pride 
of empire, his deepest dreams of progress, his most varied 
and interlacing pursuits of business, ambition, or pleasure. 
"Which State did Jeff. Davis risk*liis neck for ? »«Iventucky 
bore him, he studied treason all bis life in Mississippi, 
commenced to practice it in Alabama, graduated a classic, 
full grown culprit in Virginia, and is fast advancing into 
those states of despondency and despair which are resum- 
ing their sovereignty over liim. 

How came the Democratic Party to father so distract- 
ing and decimating a heresy ? I confess I see nothing so 
attractive in the present position of that party to stand by 
it when Democracy itself is perishing in their hands. Let 



86 ADDRESS ON THEa 

US distinguish between the Democratic community and 
the Democratic organization. The Democratic community 
are sincere, patriotic, and credulous. If they vote wrong, 
they mean right ; if they follow knaves and demagogues, 
they believe them champions of the principles they love 
and cherish. How well the Democratic organization know 
how to play on these patriotic chords. By vigorous cries 
of " traitor," " turncoat," " go with your party," " he is a 
Black Republican," " stand by the Democracy " — these 
are the magic phrases upon which they presume to whip 
into line all who would rebel against fraud, treachery, 
imbecility, and disunion. We know where to find the 
peace party. Tliey are open and honest. Strong advo- 
cates of weak governments, they hanker for ruins as Eng- 
lishmen do for tainted cheese. Muddled with Calhoun 
metaphysics about State sovereignty, in the winter of our 
fortunes, they go South for their politics, as invalids go 
for their health. Tiie larger and adroiter wing have no 
theories and no principles but for jDower. They talk war 
for JSTorthem votes, that they may make peace for South- 
ern votes. Lusting for Southern support, tliey would 
leiralize Southern treason and rob the North of the right 
to a stable government, by turning this Union into the 
hall-door of a tenement house, where States may go in and 
out and t#Rck their dirt as they please — while we intend 
that it shall be a hermetically sealed jar to preserve the 
fruits of our fathers from so destructive an atmosj^here. 

I charge the Democratic leaders with acting in this 
crisis Avithout dignity, consistency^, common sense, or cour- 
age. With increasing through envy and disappointment 
the very evils they themselves helped to produce. I charge 
them with going to the Charleston Convention in 1S60, 
and with their numerical minority as voters, and their 
numerical majority as delegates, attempting to force on 



PRESIDENTIAL CRISIS. 87 

that Convention a candidate wlio, by liis part in disturb- 
ing the Missouri Compromise, could not succeed at the 
IS'orth, and because of liis vote on the Lecompton bill 
would fail at the South, Refusing all compromise at that 
time, when concession might have saved the party and the 
country, and then denouncing the Republicans because 
they would not conciliate and compromise with violence 
and treason, when such concessions would have been de- 
grading aud useless. I charge the Democratic leaders and 
presses with pretending to advocate the war, stamping the 
" Union at all hazards " on their banners, and then 
nominating peace candidates who, after being smuggled 
through the ballot-boxes with the war-crv, seat themselves 
down in Congress to vote the soldiers in rags and the 
country in ruins. I charge them with trying to wean the 
people from a just war, by artfully exaggerating its faults, 
underrating our resources, sneering at our victories, and 
sending their governors and ex-governors whining around 
the country to twaddle about the miseries and expenses 
of this conflict, as if all wars were not miserable and ex- 
pensive, until by hearty co-operation, shoulder to shoulder, 
heart to heart, we bring them to a healthy conclusion. I 
charge this Jacobin junta with striving to drown the sound 
of their own blows upon the country in the cries of " lib- 
erty in danger," sln-ieking against arbitrary arrest, with 
the whole pack loose upon the land ; with attempting to 
bring the military and civil power into collision, with de- 
nouncing taxation and high prices, as if high prices did 
not bring high wages, while the inexhaustible resources 
of mines and lands, and tariff" and trade would sink twice 
the debt to a mere bagatelle in a few years. I charge this 
beautiful crowd with essaying to degrade the Government 
and excite the prejudices of labor and races, by calling this 
a war for the negro, when they know that the white man's 



88 ADiDRESS ON THE* 

republic depends for its life upon the red blood that is 
spilled for it now. In vain do we look for any leading 
idea, any profound national sentiment or principle under- 
lying this selfish opposition wrangle for power. 

No foreign policy, save to snarl at the policy which 
keeps us from foreign war. JSTo domestic censure for those 
who would for ever uproot our domestic rights and interests. 
No theory of treatment in dealing with the deluded de- 
spoilers of our national inheritance, unless we give up all, 
to those who would break up all, that keeps ns all, — a 
People — a Country — a Power. Nothing but an appeal to 
the lowest passions for the possession of the highest ofiices. 
"Vote our ticket because we are opposed to the war. 
Rich man, war is expensive, it snatches away your wealth. 
Poor man, war is impoverishing, it takes away yonr work. 
Brave man, war is degrading, there is no glory in certain 
deffcat." Such is the paralyzing programme a spirited 
and sagacious community are called upon to seat in the 
chair of George Washington. 

' Where is that inspired, courageous old Democratic 
Party which Jefferson founded, Jackson immortalized and 
{James Buchanan buried? Some years ago there could be 
seen stranded on the shores of Long Island Sound the 
shattered remnants of a once noble steamer. Its guards 
were down, its rudder gone, its machinery broken and 
useless. Half blackened and consumed by storm and 
coniiagration, its name still glared out in full capitals ; the 
bell which had so often rang the public to harbor and 
home still sounded meaninglessly with every shifting gale. 
Just so stands the Democratic Party, The same sound 
still calls to ns ; but it is the toll above the wreck. The 
same grand old name still waves upon the campaign 
banners, waylaying us for our suffrages ; but the vessel we 
trusted to carry us through every sea — once so powerful 



PllESIDENTIAL CRISIS. 89 

and popular — now drifts before the storm, a shrunken, 
helpless and snarlnig minority. Why is it that every east 
wind drizzles upon us a Democratic defeat ? AVliy is it 
that every northern blast Avhirls down upon us a Republi- 
can majority ? WJiy is it that the West, to which we are 
told to look for clear skies and fair weather — the West is 
black with the popular refusal to restore this so-called 
Democracy ? Alas ! Uninterrupted prosperity has wean- 
ed patriotism and wisdom from politics. Little men have 
been permitted to trifle with great principles, and death 
or disgust swept all the Democratic giants from the helm. 
The Democratic Party came into life to give life to free 
institutions. Many heroes of the devolution who fought 
for independence had no faith in popular government. 
After the formation of the Constitution this distrust ex- 
hibited itself in the support of aristocratic privileges and 
monopolies. The Democratic Party was organized to 
protect the constitution from the misconstruction of oli- 
garchs, and the people from all oppressive and illiberal 
tendencies, and not to play into the hands of despots and 
traitors. It began the world with the feare of Washiugton, 
the liatred of Hamilton, and the adoration of Jefierson 
and Madison. With its infant hands it strangled the 
Colossus of the Revolution, John Adams, and threw his 
party and his policy into tlie grave of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Has it not advocated and administered every war 
since the revolution ? Did it not banish the Indian and 
silence the nullifier ? Did it not chastise England, threaten 
France, and conquer Mexico ? and must it go down under 
the red waves of a still more "righteous couflict ? The old 
Democratic Party has added more territory to the Union 
than the peace of 1783. It purchased Louisiaua, negoti- 
ated Florida, annexed Texas, and dropped all the gold of 
California into our pockets ; and shall such a counterfeit 



90 ADDRESS ON THE 

pinclibeck successor leave it hardly a State on whicli to 
lay its dying liead ? 

I stand by the Baltimore ticket, because there I find 
my country, and nowhere else in this election do I know 
where to look for it. It plays no tricks with the crisis. 
It is bold, open, manly and national. On that platform 
sits the courage of the North, the spirit of the age, the 
genius of v/ar and the safety of America. It calls guilt 
by its right name, and proposes to deal with it in tlie 
right wa3^ It holds no parley with those who ask no 
quarter and mean no Union ; whom if you face you must 
fight, and if you treat with, you must yield. The Balti- 
more resolutions represent the highest j^oint to which 
courage and soul have raised, endangered, citizenship. The 
Chicago resolutions proclaim the most diminutive propor- 
tions to which political demoralization has shrunk Ameri- 
can character. I see there only an English libel copied 
from the London Times, and pronounced by a few shaking 
American politicans as their standard of political duty. 
They call the war a failure, tlien nominate a failure to 
prove it, then get that failure to wiite the platform a 
failure, and now it only wants one more failure on the 8th 
oflSTovcmber to finish the concern. Indeed, has all this 
tramp, and. shot and blood availed, nothing? Speak, 
howling Jeff., with your falling spirits and your disband- 
ing armies. Speak, ye thousand miles of sea-coast, with 
but one port to welcome the sneaking smuggler to your 
traitorous breast. Speak, Sherman, with your firm foot 
upon their guilty hearthstones, where you but stamp it 
and insurrection, starved and ragged, files wailing before 
you. Speak, pinching penury, useless energy. Speak, 
worthless currency, hopeless heresy, heart-broken com- 
munity. Your falling tears, jowy running slaves, your 
dying brothers, Northern traitors stunned, foreign inter- 



PRESIDENTIAL CRISIS, 91 

vention dead, do you tell me Abraham Lincoln's gripe has 
no vigor in it ? You have tried him in war, you have 
tried him in diplomacy^ you have wrestled with him at 
the foot of every throne in Europe. You have confronted 
him for thousands of miles along river, marsh and forest, 
where he has tracked you with the Indian's scent to save 
you from the Indian's destiny. You have summoned to 
your aid swamp fever, ambush, tomahawk and torpedo. 
You promised the world that you would strap the ]N^orth 
to your pole, driving the continent in double harness, and 
where are you now? A nameless, penniless, shivering 
outlaw ! shrinking from the charter signed " George Wash- 
ington," and dying by inches with the powder and ball 
of Abraham Lincoln. Is this a failm'e, oh, successful 
Yallandigham, with that hundred thousand adverse ma- 
jority gazing down upon your sinking platform ? AVe who 
have gone back to the barbarism of blows to secure the 
civilization of votes — we who love the contention of thought 
better tlian the contention of arms — who prefer always to 
conquer rather by convention than collision, we who have 
had no heart in mowing down any portion of the soul 
and strength of this nation, if that soul and that strength 
could be captured by a principle instead of an army — 
shall we not to-day, profiting by the lessons of this war 
and this election, hold up that which best keeps us up ? 
The soldier from his farthest front of danger is watching 
us from our highest stand of civil duty. Can we drop 
the national fortunes into the slij^pery hands stretched 
forth to grasp them ? Would we not half-mast the flag 
on every battle-field, for the fruits of victory vanished, for 
the dead too uselessly slain, for the living too hopelessly 
dethroned, divided, debt-ridden and degraded? "Nol we 
will treat our party as a loved mistress who has jilted us ; 
as a favorite gun that will not fire ; as a match too damp 



92 ADDRESS ON THE PRESIDENTIAL CRISIS, 

V 

with Southern tears to light. "We will huddle under this 
Lincoln shed until Democracy finds a better roof to shelter 
us from the tempest ; until better times and better men 
shall give us back our party, purified by defeat, and our 
country, relieved of the sophist and the traitor, walks forth 
once more among the nations of the earth, a redeemed, 
invincible and united commonwealth. 



ElJLOaY 



ABKAHAM LINCOLN, 

DELIVERED AT OHAKLESTOISr, SOT'TH CAEOLINA, 

MAY 6111, 1865. 



SoLDiEES ! wlio have saved the national life, why do I 
stand here to-day the orator of desolation and death? 
Why have ye half-masted that flag whicli now waves with 
new meaning over our whole America ? 

Your arms are reversed, and yet there are no reverses ; 
your shields are craped in gloom, and yet the prospect is 
clear and bright before us ; no one dares to doubt your 
sublime courage and heroic devotion, and yet you shrink 
here to-day, unnerved and helpless, before the majesty of 
this bereavement. 

Alas ! our national deliverer has fallen at tlie very 
gates of the national deliverance. He wlio brought down 
the great conspiracy to the dust is himself but dust. lie 
at whose beck a million of armed men moved upon the 
foe, had not one arm to stay the cowardly trigger that 
swept him from the earth. 

For four years crime and science' sent forth their 
IniUeted thousands to crush or capture that life which a 
single finger has reached and rended. Why could not 



94 EULOGY ON 

V 

the genius of disappointment capitulate gracefully ? Why, 
when it had lost its cause, did it not preserve its self-re- 
spect, and so descend to a decent instead of dastardly 
grave? Not that we would hold an entire community 
responsible for prompting this deed, yet the teachings of 
its leaders, the calumnies daily and hourly heaped on 
that head toiling only for the public weal, acting on a 
weak and inSane temperament, produced their natural 
fruits in this culminating crime. The purity of our Re- 
j)ublican faith, the golden stream of our returning pros- 
perity, has been stirred and stained for the first time with 
the murdered life-blood of our first Citizen. 

Jnst as we were sitting down to our second Union 
wedding feast, a skeleton stalks in upon the banquet. 

Just as we had reached that bend in the river of Re- 
tribution, that angle of anxiety, where the implements of 
adjustment were succeeding the elements of destruction ; 
just as the blood of contending armies was drying up and 
healing up on those silent and deserted battle-fields from 
which the South was limping away crushed and helpless, 
from whence the North was stalking forth strong and 
magnanimous, the demon of assassination soars to the 
very pinnacle of our triumph, treads the sacred summit 
of our civil system, enters with its grave venom the thea- 
tre of social recreation, where sits our great actor on the 
theatre of events ; with stealthy step and ghastly cheek 
it leans over into the charmed circle amidst which power 
had forgotten everything but humor and friendship ; its 
arm lifts — and our great and good friend vanishes forever. 
The chair of state sinks into the bier of death, on which 
lies the cold and clammy clod that was once the warm 
and useful life of Abraham Lincoln. Oh ! who could 
have the heart to stop the beating of such a heart, whose 
every throb was for the glory and unity of our whole 



ABEAHAM LINCOLN, 95 

America ! What brain could plan the dashing out of 
sucli a brain, that so thoughtfully, so deeply, for years, 
had been planning our redemption 1 No quarter for him 
who never drew a drop of blood beyond the lines of war ! 
No hope, no help for him who spared guilty thousands ! 
On that day, all the pride of power, all the glory of vic- 
tory, all the sense of superiority over foe and faction 
vanished. We heard not the tramp of our irresistible 
hosts, we saw not the glittering spears of our successful 
heroes as they moved in majesty over rebellion's prostrate 
and punished hordes, we saw nothing through our falling 
tears — nothing but a breathless martyr and an empty 
chair. Tliousands had fallen to help victory ; one, one 
death only could mar it, and that one nursed, cheered, led 
us up the mountain of our trial to leave us lonely and 
weeping at the peak. 

Did the shallow soul who took this life, imagine that 
he could obstruct the current of Abraham Lincoln's cause 
by choking it up with Abraham Lincoln's corpse ? Was 
he so ignorant of his victim's past as not to know that he 
who was to be injured was of all souls the most ready to 
forgive injuries? The South, which was to have been 
avenged by his death, was sure of more mercy, more help 
in their helplessness from this doomed man, than any un- 
known succeeding chief whom the exasperation of the 
North might precipitate in judgment upon the culprits. 
And even if the card sent by the assassin to the Vice- 
President had brought him within range of his shot, had 
the Speaker of the House, the President jpro tern, of the 
Senate, the heads of departments, all in their turn vanished 
from the official helm, there would have been so much 
merit to deplore, so many funerals to attend, but nothing 
else to miss or bury. No revolution to announce, no sys- 
tem to be swept away, whose roots are not in Washington, 



96 EULOGY ON 

but in the hearts and liabits of Amei-ican citizcnsliip. 
The constitution of the United States has worked its way 
into the constitution of every individual life. What is 
grounded in Imman nature, can only be eradicated by 
human nature. The habit and the influence of this 
republican system is so sure and so constant that the 
transition from one incumbent of office to another, is too 
natural, too necessary, to be disturbed by any violent 
displacement. For every Lincoln dead, there is a Lin- 
coln to follow, without jar or disconcertion, beyond the 
sentiment and gossip of the hour. A Lincoln, too, insist- 
ing on the same righteous conflict, the same redeeming 
policy ; a policy reached and shaped thoughtfully, gradu- 
ally, at first reluctantly, feeling its way timidly through 
the slow relaxing labyrinth of popular approval, until 
widely, almost unanimously, not by the freak or fanaticism 
of a man, nor in the hour of sure and exultant conquest, 
but proclaimed in suffering and in doubt, as the uifijestic 
resolve, the political and moral necessity, the deep self- 
convinced, self-defensive experience of a people deter- 
mined not to come out of this fearful tempest with a right 
half yielded, a wrong half mended, and so a community 
wholly again insecure and vulnerable. 

"When a governnlGnt depends upon an intelligent head, 
ruling an ignorant mass, the death of the one may be the 
upheaval of the other ; but when the Chief of the State 
is but the type and the epitome of the average communi- 
ty, that whole community must die before the system 
perishes. Like most of the blunderers who have attempted 
to reason on the results of our war, the assassin under- 
rated the republican system in educating the republican 
character. Calumny has erred more than it has benefited 
by reading history ; because Rome split and Europe usu- 
ally emerges from her great convulsions with old political 



ABEAHAM LINCOLN. 97 

lines obliterated, aud a new construction of her civil rela- 
tions, the great American Republic must degenerate into 
the same disruptions and divisions — forgetting tliat uni- 
versal suffrage and universal knowledge were arches oi 
salvation upon which no other republic had ever rested. 
A people who have the intelligence to see the right and 
the implement to secure it, are not born to meet the fate 
of nations who pass from commotion to commotion, with 
no interest and no voice in the result, because with no 
means to guide or influence it. " The great republic is 
gone," says the wise European philosophy of 1861. 
" Years of war, four or five republics, and then universal 
monarchy," exclaims the Count De Morny. After the 
first six months, England was to interfere; then came 
another flash of prophecy ; the military was to crush the 
civil power — a new Napoleon was to drive both houses of 
Congress out of the windows of the Capitol. 

Thiers' Frenoh Revolution and Headley's Najpoleon 
and his Marshals filled the weaker intelligence with these 
nightmares, as if soldiers, growing up and blooming all 
over with the blessings of such a government, possess the 
temptations to lawlessness of the French soldier, who 
knew nothing of the civil life of the past but by its op- 
pressions ; and who had acquired no discipline or experi- 
ence of years to shape or steady whatever better policy he 
might think he was contending for. Then came the plau- 
sible financial prophecy — that the national purse could not 
stand the expense of the national safety — the difliculty 
was too vast, the outlay too enormous. No other people 
had ever met such a strain upon its resources without 
bankruptcy. As if any other people ever possessed such 
boundless resources to draw from, such floods of emigra- 
tion, such freedom from debt, such vast undeveloped 
treasure from ocean to ocean, such awakened industry, 
7 . 



98 EULOGY ON 

and such universal enterprise, which no nation in any 
hour of civil i)eace or civil commotion could call upon to 
prop up its princes or its principles. 

And now comes this most foul, fatal, and depraved 
prophet, who, more cruelly and terribly personal in the 
application of his theory, imagines that if he can only 
strike down some of the higher officers of the govermnent, 
the confusion, the perturbation, the embarrassment that 
succeeds the blow may topple down the principle and the 
structure of the government itself; and so his dear South, 
lying helpless at the far end of the plank, suddenly, by 
the weight of the fall, is lifted again to rise and rule by 
anarchy if not by victory. Never before has this stealthy 
state corrector — born of Mexican confusion and European 
oppression — aimed its ghastly reform at America's benefi- 
cent republicanism. The spirit of assassination is not a 
reasoning spirit ; if it had the mental energy to think, the 
agitation of ideas would purify it. It is a senseless, 
nerveless, mindless monster ! too weak to argue, and too 
timid to fight its victim ; so it conceives its blow in mean- 
ness, and strikes in darkness. Every assassin is a morbid 
egotist, who, brooding on one idea, whether of revenge or 
reform, reduces to a selfish personality the cause of his 
differences. Great minds take their chances with great 
principles. If they fail, the great man is appeased by the 
consciousness of right or the martyrdom of failure. Tlie 
little mind, with no vision to comprehend either, substi- 
tutes nervous excitement for mental contemplation ; and 
so, from love of notoriety or hatred of those who difler 
with, or surpass him, becomes an assassin. Calhoun could 
stab a nation with his logic, but how his nature would 
have recoiled at such an enforcement. In the whole his- 
tory of assassination no striking man ever strikes the blow ; 
the obscure Brutus and his accomplices flow down to us 



ABEAHAM LINCOLN. 99 

only on Ceesar's blood. Richard the Third threw on de- 
graded royalty no brighter gleam than flashed from his 
perpetually descending blade. Eavillae, who murdered 
Henry of France, was a low, irresponsible fanatic. The 
murderer of the Due de Berry, in depriving France of an 
amiable sovereign, blasted more on that day, than he had 
ever benefited in all his days. Russia's Peter and Rus- 
sia's Paul and England's Perceval, all fell by men who 
never lifted themselves by word or deed above the little 
light that guided them to another's heart. And now, 
to-day, America's Lincoln comes down from a height 
loftier than his office, torn from the embrace of two mil- 
lions of uplifting votes by the blow of a second-rate mem- 
ber of a second-class profession. The people who turned 
their backs on his acting have had to face his crime. He 
who knew nothing of government has succeeded in em- 
barrassing it. He who spit upon the flag has half-masted 
it from Maine to California. The player who could not 
secure the attention of a single house has shook a conti- 
nent and startled a century. 

Yet when we remember how every life at all times is 
at the mercy of whatever insignificance or malignity 
chooses to assail it, we should thank the assassin for spar- 
ing Abeaham Lincoln to us so long. A life that has 
passed through so many phases of public sentiment, so 
many important and momentous public actions, that life 
needed to be spared if it would be tested as the represen- 
tative of the peculiar perils and novel trials of the Ameri- 
can people — this life whose first oflicial mission was to 
prove the right of the people to change their past peace- 
ably in the orbit of the constitution ; to renovate the old 
routine, to vindicate a new policy, to raise up and warm 
up more earnest men in the channels of public communi- 
cation, to face anger without fearing or provoking it, to 



100 EULOGY ON . 

rebuke without wronging a community wlio had nothing 
to fear because no one to injure them. Let us thank the 
assassin for sparing him in that trembling interval between 
the ballot and the oath, between the 6th of November, 
1860, and the 4th of March, 1861, when the elect of the 
people was permitted to take the peoj^le's chair before it 
was wrenched from him by the people's foe. Let us be 
grateful to the forbearing fiend for withholding his hand 
during that long range of eighteen months of mere defen- 
sive peace-beseeching war, when the innocent purposes of 
the President's election were so fully proved by the perti- 
nacity with which he refused to disturb slavery. AVhen 
that faithful hand, now cold in death, held on the rocking 
and reeling institution, through all the crimson sleet and 
blinding mist and fire of those murderous legions, and the 
lurid blaze from those incendiary ships wliich were shoot- 
ing and burning out of the heart of the North all the for- 
bearance which self-defence dictates to either policy or 
humanity. 

Let us thank the wretch, too, for that further delay 
when the hour came for changing the government policy 
without changing its sense of duty ; when the foe is to be 
punished more effectually by withholding the element 
that encourages his crime; when, having spared to the 
enemy more than he deserved, he could now concede to 
his friends all they asked ; could helj) the fallen and the 
favored race, help the cause, the flag and the age, by one 
word, and that word, Emancipation. It was something 
to be permitted to pronounce it, to shut up a crime by 
opening our mouth, to break a chain as well as a conspir- 
acy, to shoot this redeeming ray in the face of the thou- 
sands who died to stifle it, to throw such a light on this 
nation as no sun of genius or glory had ever shot along 
our American sky. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 101 

And now, after all the toil, the anguish, the doubt, the 
inexperience, the faith, and the courage of four years of 
conscientious labor in unparalleled fields of statesman ship, 
it was something, too, to be permitted to go, with all his 
works, his fears and hopes, to the ballot-box, and from out 
its deep tones to hear that sweetest music in the ear of all 
candidacy, "Go forth, thou good and faithful servant, to 
a new lease of labor and glory." We thank our stars 
that this star was not quenclied until the darkness which 
brooded over us had been scattered forever, crime pun- 
ished, freedom safe, and the nation paramount. These 
were the aims of his policy and are the results of his 
efforts, and no bullet stepped between them and the 
crowning consummation of his life. They conclude his 
history, they round his eulogy, and they must crown his 
immortality. The scholar cannot read his annals and 
doubt that he was equal to the events which he adminis- 
tered, or that the events themselves were equalled by auy- 
thing American since the advent of Washington. 

If we look closely into the history of preceding admin- 
istrations, we see how obviously connected was their line 
of policy growing out of the events that preceded them ; 
how, in the unresisted exercise of its functions, the execu- 
tive office is but comparatively plain sailing, despite of 
errors, and wranglings, and threats, which an appoint- 
ment may modify, a message influence, or a Veto arrest. 

The nullification of South Carolina in 1833 never dis- 
turbed even a sheet of paper in the War Office or State 
Department. Most of our constitutional disputes, hereto- 
fore, have pointed to an increase or decrease in the powers 
to be exercised under that instrument ; never to an extinc- 
tion of its functions over any State or section. Since 
Shay's very trivial rebellion, not a pistol had been 
snapped in the face of the grand old charter. 



102 EULOGY ON 

\ 

No one administration since the adoption of the con- 
stitution has been confronted with any graver question 
than the charter of a bank, the reduction of a tariff, the 
status of a Territory, the negotiation of a treaty, or the 
admission of a State, out of which logical convulsions 
often have arisen^ but which the good sense of the people 
or the government have invariably adjusted. Mr. Lin- 
coln's administration was the most trying, because it 
found itself not with the measures of government disputed, 
but its very existence denied. With the oath over him 
to administer for all the States, he found State after State 
renouncing, a jurisdiction he dare not release and could 
not control. In being peremptorily called on to accept 
the secession of States, he was invited to arrogate powers 
not granted to him in the instrument he was bound to 
support. Washington's terra of office was a period of 
serious trial and anxiety to the friends of republican gov- 
ernment. Nothing less than the influence of such a hero 
could have secured the successful adoption of a constitu- 
tion with which so many wise men differed. 

To secure a public opinion that would acquiesce in its 
jurisdiction, to reconcile the antagonism of leaders who 
distrusted each other's motives, and differed in their con- 
struction of the instrument they were aiding to administer, 
to substitute personal character and personal respect for 
tradition and experience, required a force of will, a delica- 
cy of tact, an elevation of character, a superior confidence 
in the man which only such a hero could inspire. Popu- 
lar intelligence in the time of our fathers would never have 
accepted this constitution from a conviction of its bene- 
fits. One party, fresh from the memory of British injus- 
tice, were for construing away all constraint on their 
actions; the other, more thoughtful, and fearful of the 
caprices of the multitude, insisted on approximating to 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 103 

tlie conservatism of monarchy. Washington, calmer and 
clearer than either, admonished them of both extremes, 
strenuously administering the government in a spirit of 
moderation and l^armony that permanently secured us the 
beautiful system under which we have lived and prospered. 
The administration of John Adams involved no more im- 
portant question than the necessity of relieving the nation 
of a Chief who had no faith in popular government. He 
was merely an eloquent, defiant electoral accident, a sort 
of intellectual isthmus between the harmonious grandeur 
of Washington and the great popular leadership of Thomas 
Jefferson. The presidency of Mr. Jefferson originated 
that democratic policy which for fifty years powerfully 
influenced the nation, and settled on a more comprehen- 
sive basis the influence of the people in public afi'airs — the 
grave of Federalism and the nursery of a new political 
organization, which, imder different names, has preserved 
its distinctive national disorganizing features ever since. 
Who now had the keener vision, Hamilton or Jefferson ? 
In that storm of contending statesmanship, which almost 
shook tiie great chief from his chair, was it not Hamilton 
who prophesied that the Federal Government had most to 
fear from the encroachments of the States ; and was it not 
Jefferson who, in his dread of central power, encouraged, 
under the captivating and popular terms of " State 
Eights," " Federal Usurpation," all those little local laxi- 
tudes whose continuous buzz has so impeded for fifty 
years the music of the Union, and at last, through ambi- 
tion and cunning, and the slow but sure unloosening of 
national ties by the intellectual training of the Soutliern 
young American in this plausible but perilous political 
school, brought us to this doubly perilous brink ? Our 
real destiny, both political and geographical, begins with 
this administration. To it we are indebted for all that 



104 EULOGY ON 

... V 

portion of oiir possessions included in the States of Louis- 
iana, Arkansas, Kansas, and the Territories of Nebraska 
and Washington. It laid the basis of our future states- 
manship, and with it many of our subsequent trials and 
dangers. James Madison succeeded to the legacy of Eng- 
lish difficulties bequeathed to him by the preceding rule. 
Though a statesman of profound talents and amiable vir- 
tues, no man was ever more abused for timidity and in- 
consistency. One of the principal framers of the Consti- 
tution, he felt too deeply the responsibility that authorship 
involved not to act cautiously in any matter afiecting its 
security. The issues presented during his administration 
— war with Eno-land and the assertion of our freedom on 
the sea as well as on the land — were of a nature rather to 
unite than divide the nation. It was in his time that the 
famous Hartford Convention met — the body to which 
Southern Secessionists proudly pointed as a proof that the 
I^orthern States had contemplated resorting to secession 
as well as themselves. Unfortunately for the argument, 
the Convention, which peaceably assembled, as peaceably 
dissolved, without resolving to raise even a finger against 
their best friend. If the ISTorth ever talk rebellion, they 
talk on till they talk themselves back to a more dutiful 
allegiance. In the administration of James Monroe, 
which is called by historians the era of good feeling, 
occurs the first warning of that terrible rending which 
slavery had in store foi* us. Yet the storm of the Mis- 
souri Compromise was quelled by a healthier public feel- 
ing than felled us. Tiie succeeding President, John 
Quincy Adams, seated in the trough of the sea, between 
the wave of the Missouri difficulty and the billow of ISTul- 
lification, moves on an easy swell to peace and oblivion. 
Then we come to the iron days of our inflexible Jackson, 
a soldier by feeling and profession, and no fiercer war on 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 105 

liis hands than to hunt the Indian in a swamp, silence 
France with a demand for indemnity, Sonth Carohna with 
a threat, and the great Bank with a veto. The succeeding 
regime is but an elongation of this master influence, mem- 
orable for the secession of gold and silver from the cur- 
rency, and a war of words over the burning Caroline as it 
plunged down the awful abyss of Niagara. With the 
advent of Tylerism, comes the second instalment of Abea- 
HAjyi Lincoln's future trials, in the annexation of Texas ; 
then the election of Polk, with the sweeping down of the 
great and good men of both political parties; the war 
with Mexico ; the coming in of golden lands, and the 
going out of the golden leaders who had kept up the 
health, the vigor, and the integrity of the national senti- 
ment. Later still, the Fillmore Administration advances 
with the Compromise of 1850 — the last briefly successful 
struggle against the progressing arrogance of the slave 
power, when the dying giants of our land threw the 
weight of their names and nerves into the death struggle 
for peace and justice, expiring at the very threshold of 
their labors and leaving a helpless nation to drift on 
towards blinding darkness and blood. 

With the Pierce Administration arrives the era of 
little men and great conspirators, of harmony disturbed 
and com|)acts broken, of fresh graves opened and jewels 
robbed from our illustrious dead. 

In this administration the Republican party was born 
— in this administration was cut the timber from that 
Black Forest which was to kindle our recent unholy con- 
flagi'ation; and thus these master mischief-makers pile 
liigh the burden under which the later Lincoln is to 
stagger. Soon the banner-blunderer, Buchanan, breaks 
on the lowering sky ; around him gather all the ghastly 
gamesters for empire, who read their doom in the threat- 



106 EULOGY ON 

\ 

ening minorities soon to rise to chastising majorities 
against tlieir sacrilegions plottiugs. 

Here was woven the cotton shroud in which we have 
laid the dead South of the past — here was born in the 
Convention and vote of 1860 that pillar of fire for our 
night, that Abraham Lincoln whom this day we mourn 
and bless. This son of the prairie has found a high moun- 
tain range on which to rest his great and good deeds. 
We all remember the contest of 1860. In that crash of 
parties conscientious citizens hardly knew under whicli 
fragment to retreat with their bewildered opinions ; whe- 
ther to go rail-splitting at Chicago or hair-splitting at 
Charleston ; whether to suffer respectable extinction with 
Bell and Everett, or to be frantically organized under the 
Southern Cross with Breckenridge and Lane. 

The storm rose, the sun darkened, the earth reeled ; on 
those heaving waves walked the trembling fortunes of 
America, demanding to be reassured by the exercise of a 
warmer fellowship and a more comprehensive patriotism. 
The Republican convention, too full of fear for favoritism, 
drops the giant of the Empire State and applies a more 
soothing sedative to the nervous commonwealth. Abka- 
HAM Lincoln, though untried, was also uncursed ; though 
unknown, for that very reason he could not be unpopular. 
And now who is this man they have caught up in a de- 
spairing tempest and lashed fast to this unsteady wheel? 
One indifferent Congressional term, one unsuccessful Sen- 
atorial contest, are all the political capital he can drop 
into that anxious ballot-box. Yet they knew the stout 
character looming behind that lean reputation. They 
knew how much power a citizen may exhibit without the 
official exercise of power. How the open life of the press, 
the stimip, and the tribune keep our American citizenship 
in constant communication with the men and the states- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 107 

mansliip of the times. How the active sympathies of the 
observing intellectual man broaden and deepen the range 
of his vision, and silently accumulate for him a fund of 
civil helpfulness always valuable and always liable to be 
called upon in great political emergencies. Born in Ken- 
tucky, a Southern State, reared in Illinois, a Northern 
State, he possessed just that graft which, quickening with 
neither extreme, would rule both in harmony. The sym- 
pathy of the South in feeling, the energy of the North in 
action, a pure life, a tested intellect, a varied experience 
identified with a new and growing community, who had 
earned by numbers, by patience, by population and 
power, a Presidential candidate ; proved in general fidelity 
to party principles, yet unskilled in all partisan tactics 
and all vulgar partisan schemings; with none of those 
weaknesses so common to the most extraordinary men, 
without Webster's convivial excess, or Cicero's vanity, 
or Bacon's love of money, this spotless spirit rides the 
tempest, grinding no axe, but rebellion, to powder, and 
exhibiting no weakness but the lack of instant power to 
accomplish it. Where in the long line of our administra- 
tors will you find more real dignity of character with less 
assumption of it? While other Presidents economize 
their strength with official reserve and occasional seclusion 
from those incessant personal interviews which wear out 
the Presidential energies quite as much a*s more promi- 
nent exertion, Mr. Lincoln's sweep of good nature blew 
down all the fences around his position, and so left him 
out in common where the whole herd felt at liberty to 
browse. He was the first President who had time to see 
and hear every one. In civil war he has been civil to all. 
Blood never heated his blood. Place never made him 
forget his place. Thoughtful, studious, abstemious, indus- 
trious, the man of the people. Elected for all, with an 



108 EULOGY ON 

V 

ear for all, at home always in, his hand always out, ten 
chances to one, if you or I go to the White House with a 
new invention to cradle wheat, a telegram from Gen. 
Grant's last battle does not surprise him with the instru- 
ment in his hand testing its merits in front of the White 
House. This is the democracy of manners linked to the 
democracy of principles. Sympathy for man which place 
cannot displace, and which springs only from the noblest 
natures, tested by the trials of the loftiest station. Tl\e 
war has produced nothing more remarkable than the 
growth of this character on the cause and the age. Our 
earlier chiefs received the Presidency as the crowning 
official consummation of the people's gratitude for great 
and decisive services in their behalf. The later Presi- 
dents, from Polk to Buchanan, were men of moderate 
ability and of indifferent usefulness. Lucky creatures of 
availabilit}^, for party favors they performed a party's 
behests, imparting nothing to high station, but a warning 
against the principle that placed them there. Abraham 
Lincoln, born of the same principle of availability, the 
nominee and the elect of a mere party, the sins of that 
party to embarrass his administration of the cares and 
troubles of the country, an unknown man grappling with 
and groping through unknown dangers, many trembled 
for the vote they had given when they saw the huge black 
cloud charged with that extraordinary thunder lowering- 
down on that seemingly ordinary creation of partisan 
manoeuvring. Some believed at first that the people had 
elected a joke to administer a calamity; that we had 
merely called on an awkward undertaker to lay out the 
cold remains of American liberty, so gracelessly did he 
seem to shuffle up to the temple of fame. Every man 
who found the President differing with his little w\ay of 
settling our troubles, was sure we must go to ruin with 



ABKAHAM LINCOLN. 109 

sucli an ignorant pilot. Steadily and surely this per- 
plexed chief toiled on through this mountain of misrepre- 
sentation ; ever the result of capacity not yet proved, of 
plans not yet matured, of results not yet concluded, and a 
country still to be saved. How often, on winter nights. 
Heaven's borealian light has been mistaken for some dis- 
tant barn-yard conflagration; how long, on om* wnnter 
nights, we were in doubt whether our light upon a hill 
was but a rubbish blaze, to go out with the blast, or the 
sun that was to pierce the cloud and light us to redemp- 
tion. Never had great power been wielded with such 
utter absence of egotism and self-sufficiency. Almost 
every administration has been a paraphrase of monarch- 
ical reserve in its communication and intercourse with the 
people. ]N"ow, in a moment of the greatest j)eril, when 
trouble provoked and provided for the power of a despot, 
Abraham Lincoln used authority with the sympathy of a 
friend, confronting crime in an odd and artless way, that 
pursued it with the restlessness of a fiend and punished it 
with the gentleness of a father. With what concise and 
plaintive music in his" annual messages and occasional 
addresses he chants the misereres of our struggle, a model 
of new and sympathizing eloquence in statesmanship. 

How anxiously and readily he turns to any source, 
however irresponsible, for any clue, however insignificant, 
that may lead to peace. How earnestly, at Niagara Falls, 
he plunges into the foaming question with " whomsoever 
it may concern," as to the terms upon which he will 
snatch them from the boiling abyss. How eagerly he 
explores the windings of the James and Appomattox for 
the lost jewel, taking the risk of seeming undignified 
rather than unyielding. "Willingly he holds the guilty 
hand in his grasp if there is the slightest hope the dove 
may perch there. Tlius, step by step, year by year. 



110 EULOGY ON . 

tlirougli trial, tlirongK contumely, ridicule, hatred, the 
scorn of a foreign and the target of a domestic foe, misap- 
prehended even by friends, slowly, hopefully, certainly at 
last — the people see and the world acknowledges the 
great, good, peerless man that the convention of 1860 
unwittingly stumbled upon. The calumniator is silenced, 
the battle is finished, the smoke lifts, and there stands our 
giant friend on the far height of our triumph, holding in 
one hand a captured South, and in the other the redeemed 
bondmen. 

The grandest painting in all history, because proclaim- 
ing the grandest aim of all human efi;brt, to baffle crime, 
which God abhors, and save freedom, which all men love. 

Those who threw shells at this life now go trembling 
with flowers to his grave, calling on this departed spirit, 
this abused saviour, this Illinois ape, this tyrant, this 
hyena, to plead with that avenging "judgment," for this 
mercy their last great crime robbed them of. "Who will 
say that the man who achieved these great results had not 
greatness in its best sense ? The moral greatness of forti- 
tude and purity of character, the mental greatness of wis- 
dom to see farther, and eloquence to express better the 
duties and the relations of the hour, than any citizen, 
officially or otherwise, which contemporary America 
could furnish. Does not this simplicity, this strength, 
this persevering earnestness, this hopeful, joyous, single- 
heartedness, this moral humility, this mental indepen- 
dence, this eloquence, too busy with the heart and the 
salvation of the hour to be subtle, ornate or elaborate, 
this cordial familiar miracle of work and humor, of faith 
and fear, of anxiety and energy, this eccentric dispenser 
of a most eccentric era, who will say that, with all his 
errors, his defects of insight and culture, this man was not 
miraculously meant to meet the precise exigencies of our 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Ill 

calamity ? Who will say that these high, broad Ameri- 
can characteristics are not just the needs, with a little 
more official experience, which make np the great com- 
prehensive American necessities of our peculiar states- 
manship ? 

Abraham Lincoln came into the world during the 
early part of this century. The compeer of Napoleon in 
power, he is also his cotemporary in birth. Though the 
same waters washed the jurisdiction of both, when born, 
how vast was the difference in their stations. Louis 
N^apoleon was the favorite nephew of the mightiest con- 
queror of all ages. Born under the blaze of that eagle 
eye — announced to the world with glad salvos of artillery 
— rocked in the golden cradle of the luxurious Tuilleries, 
he knew nothing of the rude helplessness that struggled 
on the far frontier of unsettled America, amid rustic huts 
and howling wildernesses and Indian war whoops, whose 
cradle, if he had any, was rocked by the piercing blast 
that swept through the unsheltered domicile of an impov- 
erished home. Behold now that dawning light beginning 
only with animal instincts and physical elements to aid 
its development. "No gentle culture, no intellectual atmo- 
sphere, no chivalrous and traditional refinement to melt 
and mould its higher sentiment and deeper cravings. All 
those rules by which great men are systematically trained, 
by which Cicero and Fenelon, Fox and Burke, and our 
"Webster, and even Clay, were unfolded and encouraged 
to advancing maturity, were denied him. Behold this 
granite will piercing these granite obstacles, through 
whose chinks gleam after gleam of helpful light is stream- 
ing until the stone crumbles, a broader flood descends, 
and the whole man, by self-culture and self-discipline, is 
lifted above the flatboat, above the rough right hand, into 
the higher brain, the loftier reach of legal knowledge, 



112 EULOGY ON . 

political power, and general usefulness, Slowlj, step by 
step, he nears the far-ojff prince, whose birth is so hopeless- 
ly above his own. The one becomes a needy adventurer, 
an exile ; the other is still an obscure attorney, but a man 
of local influence, who in dignity and self-respect would 
esteem himself equal to a seedy prince. Again they 
diverge far apart — convulsions shake the chronic storm- 
ridden home of the prince ; the outlaw becomes France's 
necessity. The Bourbon's airy diadem vanishes — at his 
touch the uncle's imperial brilliant sparkles on the dull 
brow that brooded for years over its loss. The prince is 
the great Emperor of France, and a law to Europe's 
crowned imbecility. The obscure attorney grows apace. 
He has become the people's representative. Fortune, 
too, begins to light upon his lofty patience. By times the 
god descends, and the people in their princely capacity, 
passing by all the great lights who thought themselves 
born and reared, and who talked and twisted into all 
shapes, and bent their ears low and often to hear the 
sweet majestic sound that should call them to the Presi- 
dency, the people passing them all by, this humble, 
honest, direct, genuine man is dropped into that chair 
where Washington sat, and for which Webster sighed. 
And now these rulers born at the extremes of society, in 
France and America, face each other as peers. The one 
lifted by cunning, by nerve, and the help of a great name, 
to w^ear through blood the imperial purple of a fickle 
people. The other, with the nobler arts of a noble nature, 
by wise service, by the advocacy of liberal sentiments, by 
abstinence from all sordid devices, comes up from the 
depths of the popular class to sway a vast empire, the 
equal of kings, with power and resources greater than 
France or England. Administering in peace the equal 
of several European kingdoms, and chastising witli war a 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 113 

territory commensurate with half a continent. It may be 
that a severe criticism would exact a more familiar inter- 
course with governmental action, a deeper and more com- 
prehensive reacli of intellectual culture in the administra- 
tion of important political interests; but when we con- 
sider the sagacity with which our great political and 
military struggle has been conducted, the easy grace with 
which intelligence by degrees counteracted inexperience, 
the vast amount of talent summoned to its assistance, the 
overflowing resources and the varied implements now 
awkwardly, now effectively, adjusting themselves to meet 
and master the monster wrong; the perfect simplicity, 
integrity, and single-heartedness with which our lamented 
President's intercourse with the people has been signal- 
ized ; how healtliy his moral and personal tone has acted 
on the contest ; with what perfect confidence his faith 
inspired our confidence; how familiarly and fatherly he 
has come down from the stilted formality of austere ofii- 
ciality to take our troubles by the hand ; chucking them 
under the chin, and telling them to be of good cheer ; 
mollifying the dangerous with appropriate and proper- 
turned touches of the humorous, using anecdotes as anti- 
dotes to keep human nature bland and cheerful under the 
constant pressure of the dreadful. This light-heartedness 
was not the levity of a frivolous indifference to grave 
duties, but a buoyancy born of a sanguine and genial 
enthusiasm, confiding in the success of the true and the 
good, and looking hopefully and gladly to pleasant results, 
througli a consciousness of meaning and acting always for 
the interest of all. 

Ko one suffered more intensely in these hours of doubt 

and gloom, when a triumph of the foe, on a battle-field or 

at the ballot-box, seemed to throw a momentary despair 

over the results of the contest. Here was a quiet citizeuy 

8 



114 EULOGY ON 

faithful to every civil emergency, whose pure and perse- 
vering life, gifted with a terse and peculiar eloquence, 
disj)osed him to advocate his political doctrines with 
quaint and emphatic earnestness ; this fresh and fearless 
man is suddenly called from an average routine of useful 
and responsible duties, to administer the complex ma- 
chinery of the highest and most difficult trust of modern 
imes. Who will ever forget that awful fall of 1860, 
\ hen, amid the golden beauty of autumnal foliage, and 
the still more golden splendor of national peace and 
national power, we harvested the dark November ballot ? 
It fell, the last calm flow of a nation's will through blood- 
less channels. It fell, that ghastly Presidential suffrage, 
amid the secret shudderings of a foreboding, yet still 
faithful, hopeful, and peaceful Commonwealth. Bad men 
had promised to break up a good government if this good 
man succeeded to it. They had consented, voluntarily, to 
sit down and play the game, and when the Lincoln ace 
turned up, attempted, like reckless blacklegs, to overthrow 
the table, and in the confusion snatch the stakes and enjoy 
tlie plunder. 

"Whence comes tlie philosophy of this dark suicide? 
Surely first in egotism. A people who hold another race 
in absolute subjection soon exaggerate their self-impor- 
tance and believe all races their inferior. Because they 
could flog one people at will, they thought they had only 
to tie the North up by the heels and bring it to any terms. 
Northern Democrats could have no feeling of patriotism 
for their section when such august allies demanded sub- 
mission. The next cause of their ruin was ignorance. 
Where was their arithmetic when South Carolina seceded ? 
Who told them that one was greater than two ; that the 
vast resources of the North would tremble before a Pal- 
metto leaf; that the mud-sills could drive a bargain, but 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 115 

not an enemy; the sliop-keeping crew might charge 
prices, but not batteries or bayonets ? Had they forgotten 
or never read Revolutionary History ? Was not the deep 
love of country drunk in with our mother's milk, now 
tenaciously upheld with the red flow of our ready blood ? 
Would the children of Warren and Putnam, of Schuyler 
and Greene, see this heritage swept away by the Davises 
and Lees of a more dastardly age ? 

Let those who are so proud of a separate South remem- 
ber who gave them a South to be proud of. Who, when 
Marion was vanquished and Sumter and Lincoln swept 
from the contest, sent down our Greene and our hardy 
IS^orthern help to lift their chain and restore their freedom 
and their fellowship with States, never for an hour know- 
ing a country or a home distinct from the stronger and 
more protecting North. Thus they drifted on this frantic 
fraternity, with no light but phrensy and whiskey, to their 
dark doom. 

Public opinion was confused and bewildered by the 
senseless howl of State Sovereignty from this State bought 
for $17,500 by a company of English merchants. Look 
at the grievances alleged by the declaration of the South 
Carolina Convention. The N'orth had all the ships and 
commerce, that was the crime of competition committed 
by their hard hands and honest labor. The North forced 
upon them a high tariff, and yet it was this South Caro- 
lina that insisted on a high tariff on cotton when we im- 
ported instead of exported that belligerent little fabric. 
The South had to help pay the $200,000 a year for fishing 
bounties to our seamen who sailed with their cotton and 
defended it on the high seas, while the North was paying 
their greater share of the million and a half of dollars it 
cost to carry the Southern mail, above its earnings. The 
North, in one or two States, refused to execute the Fugi- 



116 EULOGY ON » 

tive Slave Law, that is those States claimed tlie South 
Carolina privilege of nullifying an obnoxious Federal law, 
which the Federal Government faithfully fulfilled. These 
were the senseless arguments why the government of our 
fathers should be destroyed, why the whole fabric of 
organized society should be startled and loosened, why 
the nation should shake with the tramp of hostile brothers, 
why graves should be opened, homes desolated, and 
hearts broken. Why Abraham Lincoln, an angel in 
feeling, and a Democrat in action, should be called by the 
Southern press and the Southern rulers a tyrant, a baboon, 
an ape, a lord over hyenas, and the sure prey of those 
giant reformers who were so skilfully and surely tracking 
him to his lair. 

On the 4th of March, 1861, Abeaham Lincoln swore 
to stand by the charter. He walked from the ballot-box 
to the inaugural over broken oaths and dissolving States. 
Under a Scotch cap he drifted by a threatening mob to 
find himself in the presence of a confounded people and a 
paralyzed government. Every aid was needed and no 
one could be trusted. Like the air, secession had insin- 
uated itself into every crevice of public employment. 
Army and navy officers were resigning, and carrying off 
both experience and material. Clerks entrusted with the 
most important State secrets were sending them to the 
enemy, and if displaced the new might be equally as cul- 
pable. All enterprises were at a stand-still. Blood 
seemed the only business likely to thrive. Every one 
looked to him who had been accused of all this to remedy 
all this. There he stood, calm and anxious. A quiet 
man, who had come to perform a plain task, to execute 
laws which bo one before had ever questioned, to satisfy 
the voters who had sent him there, and then leave it all 
as sacredly and securely safe, the rights of each and every 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 117 

section as he found thera. Yet the storm howled on 
around this novice in statesmanship and in crime. More 
irn'oads on the holy temple, more whirling away of States, 
more faithful citizens renomicing their fidelity to a com- 
mon mother. The contest deepens. Brothers are sharp- 
ening for their brother's blood. Statesmen who could 
easily solve ordinary questions, shake their heads at the 
shaking fabric. Public sentiment is divided as to the 
powers of a government founded on sentiment. Can you 
punish the author and the owner for what they do with 
their own ? Has not a Sovereign a right to its sovereign- 
ty? Thus was a nation bewildered, staggered, lowered, 
and drunk with the sophistry of Southern phrases, until 
one day a lunatic in Montgomery telegraphed to another 
demented to fire on that sacred bunting. The ball comes 
on and knocks the film from our drowsy JSTorthern eyes, 
lifts the clouds that had obscured our self-defence, and we 
rise to the height of both our danger and our duty. Be- 
fore Sumter all was party. Kot the nation, but how 
should the Republicans act. Would concessions be con- 
sistent with the rights and results of a party victory? 
How dare defeat bully us ? Sumter's ball hurled Abra- 
ham Lincoln from the Chicago Platform to the Spring- 
field Armory. It made every American citizen an office- 
seeker, asking a place for his country among the nations ; 
asking for his own plundered citizenship ; every man was 
a government contractor that day, pleading for the Great 
Contract. Kow Abraham Lincoln is himself; now he 
puts on his official pea-jacket, goes on the national deck, 
and grasps the helm with that dauntless vigor which God 
and his Western life had given him. This bullet of Sum- 
ter relieves him of all that civil diffidence to which an 
unpractised prominence is prone and which even paralyzed 
the experience that preceded him. With more necessity 



118 EULOGY ON 

\ 

of blood comes more desertion of States. All wlio stand 
by the stability of national power need this crmnbling 
away of the yielding, unreliable material which might 
impede or fraternize indifferently with the supreme 
exigency ; and now the question is, Who shall awake and 
lead the military element. All our hope of glory and 
soldierly experience is centered in one tottering, fading, 
faithful giant. Scott of the past must be succeeded by 
some younger Scott. "With a childish enthusiasm the 
people adopt and exult over an unknown youth, modest 
and cultivated. With the generosity of unaccustomed 
war they gorge this untried hero with powder, and ball, 
and men, and confidence, and every implement of success, 
that could make merit succeed and the lack of it snarl 
and fall. 

Through all that period of criminal caution and in- 
competency, how nobly the faithful President stood by 
him whom an intelligent impatience was demanding to 
be removed. How anxiously his kind nature sustained 
this wooden hero, and urged him from splendid retreat to 
splendid retreat, to prove himself at last all this hopeful 
people lioped of him. With what eager pertinacity his 
disappointment turned from chief to chief, searching 
under every repulse for the true leader ; poring over that 
bloody volume of the War Directory to find the name and 
residence of him who was to lead this nation to victory 
and unity. 

During the first two years of the war, our greatest 
general was our general greatness. Alternately checked 
and chasing the clastic foe on innumerable battle-fields, 
yet still advancing, at last from fire- vomiting impediments, 
wide-spread toil and slaughter, are evolved in smoke and 
blood, as the genii by the sea rose out of storm and mist, 
so rose our Grant, Sherman, and Farragut, to lead back 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 119 

tlirougli fields of ceaseless triumph the reeling, staggering 
spirit of Union and Liberty. These are the names that 
make our cause strong, and would make any cause dan- 
gerous. We know, too, whose clear eye first discovered 
their merits, and whose hand signed the instruments that 
sent them forth to hew away all obstacles that stopped 
Ejpluribus unurn)s path from the Lakes to the Gulf. 

This unknown man, a stranger to ofiice and statesman- 
ship, to public praise or public blame, without great 
genius or great experience, or great fame, acquired or 
traditional, to gild error or confirm merit ; with a name 
to make, an oath to keep, a people to save, a crime to 
punish, tlie volcano heaving under his feet, the oath warn- 
ing him over his head, the dagger at his breast, an empire 
in his hands, backed by a divided Korth, defied by a 
seemingly united South, his obscure and spotless name at 
once the synonym of England's sneer and Richmond's 
curse; with only a pure heart, a clear eye and a steady 
hand to lay without flinching on the most dangerous 
crisis, the most doubtful issues, the most perplexing 
duties, the most daring and defiant, the most well-bred, 
well-considered, comprehensive, cultivated, hell-engen- 
dered plot that ever dashed its bloody hand and icy heart 
against the elements of law and order. He found himself 
heir to a statesmanship confused, shuffling and pusillan- 
imous, occupied only with the question as to how we 
should permit our institutions to be murdered most grace- 
fully, and he left its public policy candid, earnest, self- 
sustaining, engaged only with the question how the 
attempted murderers could be treated most mercifully. 
He found American nationality suddenly confronting him 
as a disgraceful doubt; he parted with it a terribly- 
respected fact. He found the government a dissolving 
giant, dying of an old cancer that had baffled the best 



120 EULOGY ON 

\ 

physicians ; lie lived to cut out the poison with his sword, 
and left his well-knit, well-mannered, vigorous, compact 
patient a perpetual and healthful mourner at his grave. 
Sorely in need of force to meet the arming crime, he found 
our little navy had been sent yachting in the Indian and 
Pacific Seas, that treason might cruise more seriously 
along the streams of our progress. He lived to fill the 
world with our swarming ships, original in design, invin- 
cible in defence, terrible in destruction, able to defend one 
continent and defy another. He came into possession of 
15,000 regular soldiers, scattered over as many miles, and 
1,000,000 of men by him equipped reversed their arms on 
his funeral march. He found the people quailing under 
a debt of eighty millions and fearing the weight of it must 
bar the door to national salvation ; he left them with their 
country redeemed, their resources more developed, their 
trade increased, and a mountain of three thousand millions 
of debt scaled at all points for investment, without ofiicial- 
ly calling on a single foreign dollar to help us purchase 
our domestic safety. He found the public feeling and the 
sense of citizenship demoralized, the tone of political re- 
sponsibility lowered, the sufii-age a mere vehicle for par- 
tisan aggrandizement, the love of country at the mercy 
of a State Eights dogma, a party tie, a demagogue's 
breath ; national obligations confused and evaporating in 
a narrow local selfishness that would part with an empire 
to save a hobby, that would not give up a prejudice to 
keep up the wisest and most beneficent systems ever 
sworn to by man. He lived to see the sun dawn on a 
united people purified by sufiering ; their sense of danger 
elevating their sense of duty and unity. By personal 
example of earnest, disinterested public service, by pa- 
tience, courage and faith in all well-doing, more than by 
sermon, homily or proclamation, did this good chieftain 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 121 

moTild the better life of the nation and preserve it from 
false prophets and false issues ; keeping it in the steady 
line of calm and inflexible determination to pass through 
its perils, to accept its sacrifices, to live up to its duties, 
and so save all that heroism had acquired and freedom 
and virtue sanctified. He accomplished all this, not 
without, perhaps, many errors of inexperience and defects 
of judgment ; not without sometimes ringing the little bell 
a little too often, or drawing the bolt a little too soon ; 
sometimes overworking the war power, in which fewer 
mistakes could hardly have been made with so many 
crimes to lock up and use up ; the people preferring the 
occasional despotism of mistakes to the permanent despot- 
ism of crimes — preferring an incompetent man, sometimes 
inadvertently kept in office, to an absurd cause enthroned 
forever. He passed through this storm of war, this criti- 
cism of civil duty, these murmurs of complaint, these 
periods of ]3anic, to victory and immortality, not without 
much help from heaven, many friends, brilliant aids and 
immense resources. He saw a foreign oligarchy envious 
and malignant, banded to write down and wear down the 
purest and most powerful type of modern republicanism ; 
he saw a home opposition, reckless, wanton and depraved, 
showering his most righteous acts with defiant slanders 
and cruel perversions in a crisis entitled to magnanimity 
and a generous forbearance ; he saw this dastardly tribe 
brought down, humbled and helpless, before the simple 
efibrts of persistent and well-directed achievements ; he 
saw the South that had exhausted upon him every epithet 
and every feeling of hatred and calumny, who had taught 
their slaves to ridicule him, their cliildren to loathe and 
lisp the alphabet of never-ending scorn and bitterness, he 
saw this South staggering and dying under his incessant 
blows, lifting its fainting head to deny and to regret a 



122 EULOGY ON 

\ 

death which might uncomfortably precipitate them from 
the chastisement of principle to the chastisement of 
revenge. 

To all these merits of energy, patience, probity, saga- 
city, eloquence, and aptitude for organization and execu- 
tion, which distinguished the great emancipator, must 
now be added the melancholy merit of national martyr- 
dom. As in his life his achievements render his rule the 
most important and conspicuous Presidential career since 
"Washington's, so in his death he stands alone as the first 
public character violently swept from the sphere of its 
usefulness ; a great guardian stricken down from the side 
of a great tnith, just as it was passing from the perils of war 
to the exigencies of peace. Will not emancipation — this 
infant, born in the hail of blood-blinding war — will it not 
miss that relaxed hand, that stilled voice, as the orphan 
totters through opposing ranks to rank and power? 

Abraham Lincoln fell on the very day the old flag 
came down on Sumter; when we stood on that ruin 
which was yet more the ruin of the South ; but not till 
his soul had gone up with the flag ; not until the perti- 
nacity of the ISTorth had waved a mended principle over a 
broken fortress. And now, with this loved one vanished, 
this Union saved, this sad Southern people prostrate, this 
peace perched on every surly battlement of rebellion, will 
the South pass thus sullenly from the eminence of defi- 
ance to the extreme of apathy and indifierence? 

"Why is it that in all these conquered districts we hear 
so much of the people's love of the Union, and no attempt 
to work up this Union feeling into State organization and 
national co-operation? All ready to cringe to power, to 
forswear the past, ready to take rations, take oaths, take 
office, take anything to save property and avoid the 
last ditch. Where is all that manhood which braved 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 123 

death, defied tlie world, and staked everything for Jeff? 
That rebelled, robbed, lied, slaughtered, hung, and burned 
for the right to break up, and will do nothing to make up, 
that involves reason, thought, loyalty, and earnest political 
brotherhood ? 

Come back, oh deluded and defeated South. Come 
back in feeling as you are already back by compulsion. 
Those who won you with their superior sword would hold 
you by the equal charter. For blows and curses, for hard 
names and light fingers, for ruin diverted from abroad 
and bafiled at home, for all but the leadership in your 
hellish crimes, we offer just laws, equal rights, and a 
common share in that loving government only made more 
immortal by warding off the death-blow you would have 
dealt it. 

With all the desolation of your fields and homes, you 
have lost nothing permanently but a traitorous crew and 
a poisonous creed ; nothing which industry will not repair 
and patriotism secure. Remember, slavery was never in 
danger until you lost your senses ; remember, too, that it 
never can be restored until we lose om*s. The same talent 
and energy employed in the arts of peace that you have 
exhibited in war, the same toil with your white hands, the 
same endurance of fatigue and hardships, of hunger and 
danger, through desperate encounters and dreary marches 
which made you the slaves of slavery, by peaceful free 
labor, will restore you to a nobler and more abundant 
prosperity than was ever wrung from the toil of others. 
You can hire the negro's freedom cheaper than you can 
buy his servitude. The interest on his slave value will 
almost pay his free wages, while his own interest in the 
rights of men will increase the energy with which he 
develops your wealth. Free labor alone has conquered 
you. It invites emigration, it develops and then accunm- 



124 EULOGY ON 

lates resources too vastly and too quickly for slavery to 
compete with. The negro, as slave, failed to keep off war 
or to keep up war for your advantage; now try if the 
negro as freeman, may not prolong peace and so insure 
harmony, unity, and a less sensitive form of progress and 
prosperity. Will you forget that you must arouse, orga- 
nize, and recover your lost civil status? As war has 
thrashed out of you the beaten and demolished theory 
that a State may defy and destroy a nation, why not 
heartily and permanently shape the State law and con- 
form every local obligation and every moral and political 
sentiment to the spirit of national duty ; co-operating in 
cheerful concurrence with the great Federal amendment, 
so that never dii'ectly or by implication shall any clause 
be so doubtful in the constitution as to tempt the traitor 
or wean the patriot from fealty to the supreme law of the 
Union, and thus divert misery and ruin from yourself and 
your childi-en to the latest generation 'i 

Will not this Southern people call conventions, appoint 
elections, send delegates back voluntarily to that Congress 
they voluntarily spurned, and thus, in the good American 
way, by argument, by peaceful investigation and hopeful 
reference to representative and judicial adjudication, sub- 
mit their rights and wants, under a returning submission 
and sense of duty, to those who in their better days de- 
cided wisely and well for us all ; or else, in stubbornness 
and anger, remain under this military post-garrison form 
of pupilage, or go forth wanderers to people some more 
Southern solitude ; or, like the Arab or the gipsy, intrude 
on luckier races branded with the marks of unrespected 
martyrdom ? Laws, habits, language, feeling, kindred, 
make us one people. Love and trade, as well as moun- 
tains and rivers, matrimony, as well as geography, have 
made us one people. Tou cannot form two nations of a 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 125 

community with a Yankee aunt and grandmother hanging 
up reverently in every Southern parlor, with a Southern 
sister or grandfather j)iously packed away in every ISTorth- 
ern home. Is the Southern pride wounded hy defeat? 
The very exertions that have been vanquished have made 
them famous, and by the industry of the efibrt prepared 
them for that free labor which they could not avoid. If 
they have lost their slaves they have gained themselves — 
gained knowledge, gained self-reliance, and a surer and 
quicker development. Admitting that the whole value 
of the slaves was one thousand millions of dollars, which 
they have lost, yet it is not one-half the sum the ISTorth 
has had to pay to maintain the Government. Are they 
desolate and impoverished ? 'Not more so than any des- 
perate speculator who embarks his all in some such wild- 
cat bank and fails. If they will invest in damnation, they 
must expect their profits to be hell. If the negro proves 
himself worthy of free labor it will ensure to Southern 
ambition more political power by enlarging the Southern 
constituency ; it will make Southern lands more valuable 
by increasing their productiveness ; and with the generous 
tender of ITorthern capital, this Southern community must 
rapidly recover from its depletion. 

And now, soldiers ! sons of our North ! saviours of our 
nation ! your days of danger'and strife are drawing to a 
close. No heroes of the world tread more enviable 
heights of fame. Your bayonets have been gleaming 
spires over that holy church of liberty in which your 
fathers and your brothers worshipped. 

Through all your marches you have never forgotten 
that you were citizens as well as soldiers ; that you were 
moving at no unrighteous conqueror's beck. Amid all 
the storm of battle, on picket, through the drill, or by the 
camp fire, the spirit of your Government was simply call- 



126 EULOGY ON ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

ing npon you to perfect your own citizenship. No can- 
non could drown that voice — no raid capture the resolu- 
tion to obey it. 

The glory of your deeds will remain with you through 
life; it will influence your character and insure you 
respect. The sight of that old flag, when it flits between 
your cares and your dreams and waves over some civil 
duty abandoned on holidays or festivals, you will think 
how you followed it as it streamed on fields of fire. How 
the nation reeled or righted as you shrunk from or breast- 
ed the guilty lines that confronted it. 

And as your eyes gleam with exultation over the dan- 
gers you escaped, and the rights you snatched from the 
traitors' grasp, you will mingle your glad refrain with 
loved memories of that great and good chief who first 
called you into service, equipped you for battle, and with 
a father's care and a monarch's power, followed you with 
cheering words through every contest, until the bullet 
that spared you laid low his life, fresh from the freedom 
of one race and the safety of another. 



ADDRESS 



DEATH OF EDWAKD EVERETT. 



WRITTEN FOE THE SOLDIER S FRIEND. 



Soldiers ! You who have mowed down so many lives, 
to whom graves are as familiar as wounds, there is one 
death that must move you. The lips that have so often 
plead for your comfort and your glory cannot moulder 
without a tear or a memory for* such a man. 

Edward Everett is dead ! What a startling announce- 
ment to a people who, for so many years, have shaped 
their ears and hopes to his graceful teachings. In a dark 
liour, when the precious metals are so high and scarce, the 
loss of that silver tongue is indeed a calamity. "Where 
shall the anniversary oration, the holiday festival, the 
complimentary banquet, the political crisis, and, above 
all, this righteous conflict, look for so finished, so experi- 
enced, and so animated a mouth-piece ? 

Edward Everett was not ah orator in its highest sense. 
I will not say he was not profound. It is not the business 
of oratory to be profound in anything but feeling, nor to 
be original in anything but statement and illustration. 
Orators are the medium tlirough which the thoughts of 



128 ADDRESS ON THE 

great men and the duty of great achievements are ex- 
plained and conveyed to the masses. Their business is to 
inspire men with the love of country, of virtue, of justice, 
and of beauty in thought and action, and this can only be 
accomplished by employing the clearest, simplest, and 
most intelligible forms of thought and expression . Edward 
Everett was not what we delight to call a born orator, 
overflowing and spontaneous, like Patrick Henry or Henry 
Clay. He had not the bold and massive amplitude of 
Webster, nor the rich and vigorous comprehensiveness of 
Burke; neither could he compare with Choate in real 
earnestness, in familiar candor of manner, and that gush- 
ing sympathetic sweetness of style, on whose golden stream 
swam the whole structure of thought, learning, taste, 
fancy, and logic, which the heart or brain of the orator 
could conceive or convey. Everett never for a moment 
forgot Everett. All that he said or wrote was finished, 
scholarly, intelligent, and informing. It added to our 
knowledge and corrected our taste, but neither stirred our 
blood nor won our heart. Yet he was artist enough to 
use in his orations the materials that inspire sympathy, 
and he no doubt was man enough to feel them ; but he 
lacked that indescribable something which succeeds in 
conveying to others the highest efforts of self-forgetting, 
soul-inspiring power. 

His oration on the inauguration of the Dudley Observa- 
tory is a serene master-piece of starry oratory. The sub- 
ject was peculiarly adapted to his character of eloquence. 
It had no immediate connection with the passions or per- 
sons of the hour. It required some knowledge of astron- 
omy, fine moral sensibility, an appreciation of abstract 
beauty, and an artistic power of grouping the grand and 
the distant into forms which mysteriously link them to 
our pursuit of happiness and duty. The celebrated oration 



DEATH OF EDWARD EVERETT. 129 

on Washington, delivered in aid of tlie pnrcliase of the 
home of Washington, received, and indeed deserved, all 
the merit awarded to it. 

No orator in our age, or any otlier age, ever produced 
such substantial pecuniary results for the benefit of so 
endearing and sacred a cause. Yet, as a great mental 
effoi't, it cannot rank with the ablest productions of the 
times, nor even is it equal to some of his own less ambi- 
tious and less carefuEy prepared addresses. 

At Gettysburg there came forth the whole soul of the 
orator and the man, to bind up, in undying words, the 
deatliless deeds of the martyred band that lay crumbling 
beneath his inspiration. And is there a field whose lan- 
guage could paint achievement more vividly than on the 
very spot of its performance ? His feet were soaking in 
the still undried blood of the battle ; liis lungs were inhal- 
ing the yet lingering smoke of a thousand" cannon ; his 
eyes gazed on the trodden grass, the ruined harvest, 
the crushed homes, the unburied dead, the ghastly, wide- 
spread desolation, invoked by the murderous rush of those 
angry billows of men that flowed and surged and bore 
each other down, that they might save or blast the hopes 
of republican liberty. And there was that calm man of 
speech, succeeding that angry clash of arms, the deserted 
implements of destruction all around him, and out of the 
havoc of their expired ferocity comes the sweet soft tone 
of a power and a patriotism as strong and determined, and 
yet more peaceful and beautiful in its teachings than the 
glorious blaze of vanished but conquering heroes. 

Yet Mr. Everett will stand higher with posterity as a 
publicist than an orator. During his long participation in 
political life, as Senator in Congress, Secretary of State, 
and Minister to England, his numerous state papers and 
diplomatic correspondence were invaluable contributions 
9 



130 ADDRESS ON THE* 

to the political knowledge of the country. Few statesmen 
have exhibited more skilful aptitude for diplomacy, or a 
more accurate knowledge and nicer skill in dealing with the 
questions aifecting our domestic and international relations. 
We never read an address or a communication from Mr. 
Everett, on M'hatever may be the most engrossing subject 
of public interest at the moment, that we do not gain some 
new fact, or argument, some new light, to guide and 
determine our judgment, after other leading men have 
exhausted their knowledge of it. His Fourth of July 
Address, in 1861, on the causes and consequences of the 
rebellion, contains more facts in relation to that event, and 
more arguments against it, than all the rest of the public 
speeches on the same subject since. 

Mr. Everett's pride was in his oratory, but his real 
strength lay in his true knowledge of public affairs ; in his 
faculty for industriously collating and impartially com- 
menting on political questions. 

His was not a character of commanding, initiative 
energy, that, fortified by will, and impelled by bold moral 
passions, founds sects, leads parties, and revolutionizes 
creeds. It was a balancing, delicate, yet interested and 
enterprising nature, that pursues and perceives, but satis- 
fies itself rather with commenting than controlling, and so 
dies without a follower or an enemy ; sure of some imitators 
and millions of admirers. His high American tone, his 
unswerving integrity of conduct and purpose, his intense 
national feeling and service, insure, while others take the 
chair, he will take the niche. No general in the field has 
worked harder for the Union than the peaceful, unarmed 
Edwaed Everett. He filled armies if he did not com- 
mand them. His tongue has been the best tax-gatherer 
in the nation. First it raised thousands to purchase the 
tomb of Washino:ton ; then, chanting a sterner and loftier 



DEATH OF EDWAKD EVERETT, 131 

strain, it raised thousands more to save the work of Wash- 
ington. 

This is the man, tlic man of culture and caution, too 
wise to love error and too timid to reform it, whom the 
temporizers of 1860 tied to their Yice-Presidential ticket. 
A ticket that went to battle with an empty musket ; that 
in a great moral and political crisis had no creed, a ticket 
which clung to the past because it was experience ; shrunk 
from the future, because it was experiment ; and paralyzed 
the present by vivifying it with neither the dream of the 
phihinthropist nor the daring advances of the slaveholder. 
It was a pitiable sight to see tliis weak-kneed coterie at- 
tempting to attain power by dodging the radical storm 
that raged between the White House and the ballot-box. 

Yet the banner of equivocation waved over a wider 
field than the genuine issues. While the Lincoln vote 
was stopped at the Blue Kidge and the Mississippi ; while 
the Breckenridge ticket swooned and froze under the cold 
blasts of the Republican North, the name of Bell and 
Everett, warranted to keep in any climate, rustling alike 
over prairie, cane-brake and cotton-plant, fanned the heated 
South with the motto of conservatism into a delusive 
temporary equanimity. The civil contest concluded, the 
conservative wrong is swept away by the radical right. 
The Southern votes for Everett of peace harden into 
steel against the Everett of war. Tlie Scholar Politician, 
trembling and trimming rather to save a people than yield 
a place, buries his compromises in the masonry of Fort 
Sumter. Out of that smoke by the sea the giant rises ; 
stretching his sceptre of speech over the vast commotion, 
he calls millions to redeem the threatened nation. Like 
white sugar, his oratory needed blood to turn it. For four 
years that voice has been loyal, radical and defiant, the 
trimmer swallowed up in the exterminator, the iron coming 



132 ADDRESS ON THE DEATH OF EDWARD EVERETT. 

to tlie rescue of the silver in his nature. Edward Everett 
was not permitted to die until all doubts of his greatness 
were removed. He who had spent his life in finding 
arguments to keep down the negro in order to save the 
white man, at last could speak the word that makes the 
slave's freedom the safety of both races. 

His coffin sinks between the Proclamation and the 
Amendment. Yet so near to the amendment that the 
falling fetters of the slave di'op close enough to join with 
their music the, requiem of his departure. 

SoLDiEJSs ! he was your best living unbraided example 
of loyalty, bravery, and industrious perseverance in 
battling for the right. Scholar, statesman, and politician, 
aspiring for honors, office, or power ; here is one who held 
them all not by cunning fraud, selfishness, or corruption, 
but advanced and adorned them all, official power with 
moral power — the chair of state with the chair of learning, 
popularity with duty, the caprices of multitudes with the 
steadiness of pure aims and industrious habits. Follow his 
example, and you may go to your grave smothered in his 
flowers, ringing with his plaudits. Forget him, prefer 
cunning to candor, treason to patriotism, pursue the op- 
posite road to fame, and I care not how high you soar, 
Arnold, Eurr and Davis will be the dark trinity to whose 
degraded eminence posterity will commit your worthless 
immortality. 



LETTER 



ADDEESSED TO 



PRESIDENT LINCOLN, 



AT THE REQUEST OF THE 



WORKINaMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK. 



[The "Workingmen's Association of this city some 
days since passed a resolution requesting David S. Cod- 
DiNGTON, Esq., to address President Lincoln a congratula- 
tory letter in their behalf upon his inauguration and the 
progress of events. Mr. Coddington complied with their 
request in the following production :] 

"New Yoek, March 4, 1865. 
" Abkahajm Lincoln : 

" I am deputed by the Workingmen's Association 
of this city to congratulate you, the hardest worker of 
them all, upon the noble worlc which, through you, free 
labor is achieving for free government. To-day yom- 
new administration steps into the circle of nations with a 
new America. The obligations of the past are dissolved. 
Reluctance to disturb an especial institution has been 



134 LETTER ADDRESSED TD 

summarily cured by tlie awful vigor with whicli tliat in- 
stitution lias sliaken and disturbed us. That branch of 
State rights which gives a State the right to destroy the 
nation has been confiscated by the nation. Violated 
democracy secures its safety and revenges its wrongs by 
withdrawing the right to degrade labor, 

" To-day at twelve o'clock you will again lay your 
winning hand on that Inaugural Bible, once moist with 
the warm, pure kiss of "Washington. For thirty years 
your predecessors' Presidential lives have expired with 
their first term. How is it that you, reeking with con- 
flict, and gory with recreant blood, march to your second 
oath with a conqueror's strength and a saviour's apj^lause ? 
How is it that you, who have exhausted more treasure, 
encouraged more taxes, hurled more thunder, and filled 
more graves than all the combined Presidents since the 
constitution, than all the heroes and statesmen preceding 
the constitution, than any conqueror who has founded or 
distracted American empire, from Fernando Cortez to the 
German emigrant who struts under the pilfered crown of 
Mexico ; — how is it, with the habeas corpus suspended. 
Fort Lafayette in good working order, and errors com- 
mitted, both political and military, you go to the Capitol 
to-day riddled with flowers instead of bayonets ; armed 
only with a Bible and flag, swept there by no force but 
the overwhelming flood of warm and willing votes ? If 
to preserve the principles of "Washington you have been 
obliged to destroy life with the prodigality of I^apoleon, 
a discriminating people have consigned you to no rock 
but the solid constancy of the national approbation. They 
believe that if you have stretched power, it was to pre- 
serve power ; if you are spilling your brother's blood, it is 
to save your father's work. They know that the ferocity 
and discord of a few years means the humanity and hai*- 



PRESIDENT LINCOLN. 135 

mony of centuries. They see the yoke of a guiltless race 
falling into the grave of a guilty South, and they cry 
amen to a deed that punishes the rebel's broken oath with 
the negro's broken chain. Abstract virtue might exact a 
less selfish emancipation. But when we remember the 
trials of a people tied up with inherited evils, the struggle 
and the deliverance are not unworthy of ns. 

" Some wise people think that to spare slavery now is 
to stop war. But as slavery was safely spared when it 
began war, what hope is there that a government which 
was defied when its debt was only eighty millions of dol- 
lars, will not be attacked when it is oppressed with a debt 
of two or three thousand millions of dollars ? The debt 
alone must destroy slavery, or slavery will crush us with 
debt. Bring them back without emancipation and this 
is their argument : ' We hate you as ever, because you 
hate slavery, because you are richer than us, and more 
than ever now because you have beaten us. We ground 
our arms because you are too many for ns — that is no dis- 
grace. You have grounded your principles to save more 
debt — that is contemptible. You have spent three thou- 
sand millions of dollars, endured great suff'ering, and here 
we are with our old hate and our old institution back 
again, ready, if you begin to caut and talk anti-slavery 
again, to fight you again, with a better chance next time, 
when you are staggering towards bankruptcy.' 

" ' Oh, but slavery is dead,' says the opposition. This 
time the tomb is a dodge to get into the temple. If the 
war should run off every slave but two, and the South 
should come back with only Pompey and Dinah, they 
would in time breed back the real slave population, breed 
back the old brood of fire-eaters, conspirators, and armed 
enemies, and, with the help of Vallandigham & Co. here, 
and of Laird & Co.'s English neutrality abroad, who 



136 LETTER ADDRESSED TO 

v. 

doubts their ability for increased mischief ? Tliose M'ho 
cry ruin if we don't spare slavery, cried ruin if we re-elect- 
ed you ; cried ruin if you superseded McCJellan ; cried 
ruin if we resisted traitors. It is the favorite cry against 
those who differ with us. In 1824, Webster cried ruin 
if a high tariff was passed. In 1842, he cried ruin if it 
was defeated. Clay told the world that the Sub-Treasury 
was the knell of finance, and when a boy, I heard a dis- 
tinguished publicist call Jackson a scoundrel, who should 
be shot ; and I heard the same person very lately speak 
of him as all that was great and good. Without abolition, 
what do we gain by blood sacrifice ? ISTot population or 
territory, for we fight no foreign foe; not colonies, or de- 
, pendencies, for we bring back only our equals. It is 
nothing to punish unless we remove the cause of punish- 
ment. Is the great commotion to produce only railroads 
torn up and store-houses burned down ? Is that in the 7- 
30 and 10-40 contracts? No, sir. The workingmen of 
this nation expect to work out of this war with the digni- 
ty of work fully established. As a skilful pianist only 
brings out the full tones of his instrument in touching all 
the keys, both black and white, so shall you in using all 
the forces of free labor draw out the grand harmonies of 
our national march. 

" Four years ago you were dodging assassins on your 
way to empire. To-day your safe conduct is written with 
the blood that oozes from a dying heresy. Four years 
ago you only rode to the capital through a gap in the 
democratic party ; to-day you are there in spite of the 
union of all the elements that threatened the Union. In 
that anxious IS^ovember contest how we held our breath 
for fear some other breath of popular caprice might waft 
some weaker hand to grasp the difficulty, might lift some 
lesser light to chase this southern darkness from our land. 



PRESIDENT LINCOLN. 137 

The delicate and important point in tliat canvass was, 
liow to elect you without spoiling you ; how to trust your 
future without sanctioning all your past. Popularity so 
often exaggerates self-importance, that self-discipline some- 
times relapses into self-sufficiency. Heavy minorities are 
the healthiest monitors of successful candidates for power. 
E-ulers will measure their duties by the distance between 
the possession of office and the possibility of its loss. In 
perilous times, while wielding immense resources, the 
temptation to play the despot is always strong. It is so 
simple, so direct and so effective. In proportion as 
powerful elements are excited are w^ stimulated to use 
power in grappling with them. But in the last Presi- 
dential contest the issues were so wide apart, the alterna- 
tive so distinct and peremptory, whether we would sur- 
render to a crime or get along with a few faults, many 
virtues and much experience, that whatever fear the peo- 
ple felt of demoralizing you with an extravagant approval, 
was lost in the pride of overwhelmingly extinguishing the 
deo-radine: ticket that confronted you. 

" The people of this country are ever a hopeful people — 
hopeful of victories in battle, hopeful of reform in rulers. 
They do not believe that you will misconstrue your tri- 
umph, although you go back to the chair almost with the 
strength of a constitutional amendment. 

" You may have shaped the first for this second coming 
• — your future rule can only prepare itself for a grateful 
immortality. Your election in 1860 was a political com- 
monplace ; the old story of ' available candidate ' and a 
party victory, born of Greeley's tactics and Buchanan's 
blunders. The North, too humane to love slavery, and 
too constitutional to disturb it, meant no mischief until 
the mischief-mongers of the South taught us how to beat 
them at their own business. No doubt the instincts of 



138 LETTER ADDRESSED TO 

the nation would liave gravitated in time to where war 
has hurried it. All great reforms have been precipitated 
by the crimes or the weaknesses of individuals. The im- 
becility of King John • gave England Magna Charta a 
hundred years before the intelligence of the age could 
have wrung it from the average energy of barbaric power. 
Habeas corpus was hastened by Charles the Second's love 
of women being more ardent than his love of. authority. 
Common prudence in Lord North and his compeers might 
have adjourned the Declaration of Independence until 
this very hour that we have so powerfully proved our 
right to it. The ball fired at our government has brought 
down nothing but the institution which most embarrassed 
it. The South thought the I^orth was playing billiards 
with the election of 1860. Cushioning on the Territories 
to carom on the States ; in pushing their cues too vigor- 
ously they have only pocketed themselves. 

" No man ever assumed power so disadvantageously as 
yourself. Some Western lawsuits, a few stump speeches, 
and one unexciting Congressional term sums up the ex- 
perience that was to administer a calamity fifty years 
brewing. Yet directness of purpose and vigor of under- 
standing have relieved us from the sad anarchy promised 
by the experienced imbecility that preceded you. You 
left home with a confused impression that something was 
wrong, but that it must all work right. Fond of a joke 
yourself, it might be possible they were only helping you 
to a new anecdote. A government so innocent could not 
be the victim of such guilt. You brought an honest heart 
to a deceitful era. You possessed neither the perceptions 
nor the wickedness to see the awful depth of the maligni- 
ty that lay at the base of your election. When you 
stepped upon the deck, what wild disorder pervaded the 
ship of state ? There lay the old pilot swooning at the 



PRESIDENT LINCOLN. 139 

lielin, drugged with Southern opiates. There lay the con- 
stitution torn in pieces by the wrestlings of its defenders. 
The very freedom of the system embarrassing all freedom 
of action, no pretext to justify wrong, no precedent to 
need it. How shall authority be exercised against the 
authors of all authority? With a bewildered look you 
gazed on the ghastly gift of November, in doubt whether 
you came to Washington to attend a funeral or execute a 
contract. Office-seekers begging for office, patriots asking 
for a country ; the rebel commissioners knocking for ad- 
mission — not for the halter they had earned — but for their 
share of the ruins they had made ; not ambassadors, but 
grave-diggers came for the body, prepared to bnry Ameri- 
can liberty under the dust of their rubbish platitudes. 
We all have our theories how they ought to have been 
treated, how much wiser our little wisdom could have 
managed the war. Ministers of great emergencies escape 
not great calumnies. Censure now, immortality hereafter. 
Washington shot in effigy by one State; moved to be im- 
peached by another, the descendants of both contending 
for his autograph. If Jackson regretted at his death-bed 
that he had not hung Calhoun, no such sorrow can shade 
the dying hour of Abraham Lincoln. The shot he has 
poured into Calhoun's successors will rattle along the cen- 
turies for many eras of American history, to which saddest 
and profoundest calamity of that history he is indissolubly 
linked. If Jackson immortalized himself by rocking to 
sleep the infant disunion, what must be his fame who shall 
forever hush the fuU-growm demon ? 

"If George Washington challenges the glory of the 
world for lifting up one race, what renown awaits him 
who redeems two ? Saratoga and Yorktown snapped the 
Americo-Saxon chain, but Grant's gripe chokes the wrongs 
of two races ; Sherman's march guards the progress of the 



140 LETTER ADDRESSED TO PRESIDENT LINCOLN. 

fallen as well as the favored color. The South, which 
loses its temper in proportion as it loses its territories, 
attempts to stamp on the leader in all these reforms the 
degrading epithets of 'tyrant,' 'buffoon,' 'Illinois ape.' 
Unfortunately for them, unlike the African ape, his anger 
does not throw down at random luscious cocoanuts. The 
fruit are bettef aimed, and bear blood instead of milk. 

"The contest, thougli unfinished, is no longer uncer- 
tain. Calhoun's grave is in our possession. His theory 
is under the feet of our armed heroes. What peace shall 
parole the captured doctrine? As workingmen respect- 
fully but manfully addressing the master-worker, this 
Association bid you God speed. 

" David S. Coddington, 

" On behalf of the "Workingmen's Democratic-Repub- 
lican Association of New York." 



SPEECH 



BEFORE THE 



15TH WAED FREE SOIL LEAGUE, 

NOVEMBER, 1848.^ 



I MIGHT be tempted to apologize for the presumption 
wliicli brings either the person or the sentiment of so 
obscnre an individual as myself before this assemblage, 
was I not persuaded that my audacity, like our prosperity, 
is the natural result of those intimate relations which the 
humblest of us bear towards the government of the coun- 
try. "When wise statesmen, in grave council, place the 
disposal of great questions and the selection of great offi- 
cers at the mercy of the boy of twenty-one, equally with 
the veteran of sixty ; when the state in adopting us, as a 
necessity teaches us to be proud, by permitting us to 
decide; when it gives importance to insignificance, by 
associating the ignorant and the inexperienced in a com- 
munity of privileges with learning and intelligence, I 
own the pride of ultimate power reassures my diffident 
mediocrity and encourages me, however humble, to claim 
of you that indulgence in the discussion of important 
principles which the law has so solemnly granted me with 
others in determining. For, be it remembered that the 



142 SPEECH BEFORE THE 

power wliicli places a ballot in our hands is but the recog- 
nition of that higher power which placed a voice in our 
mouths, and that the security and efficacy of the one de- 
pends much upon the truth, the freedom, and the energy 
with which we exercise the other. It is a condition of 
liberty that society thall be burthened in proportion as it 
is favored, that the decree of the fall shall accompany our 
rise ; that man must toil for his freedom as he does for his 
bread ; that every immunity is the parent of a respon- 
sibility, and that increased duties are but incidental to 
multiplied rights. It is the purport of these duties to 
elevate our morals to the level of our fortunes, to render 
natures equally as corrupt as the rest of the race worthy 
to enjoy institutions far superior, and by making each 
man's politics the guardian of his personal interests, not 
only to preserve but justify the principle that exacts them. 
For what is this liberty of which we boast so much but a 
presumptuous paradox, until, by discipline and self-sacri- 
fice, by that magnanimity which will not abuse power, 
and that fortitude which, in the moment of peril, can sus- 
tain it, by ceaseless vigilance and approved sagacity, it 
has worked its way to the dignity of a truth and the cer- 
tainty of a blessing ? "What right have we to rebel against 
the world's law, who appropriate to ourselves the world's 
goods, imless we sanctify that rebellion by obedience to a 
holier creed ? By what authority do we build the free- 
man's privileges upon the Christian's precepts if this sov- 
ereign discretion is to become an instrument of immorali- 
ty — if this hard-earned, dearly-prized, never to be excelled 
acquisition is, after all, only a new way to perpetuate old 
vices, only a wider path in the same journey of national 
aggression, beginning in the pertinacity which adheres to 
past perfidy and ending in the extension of inherited pol- 
lution over tortiously acquired possessions? These are 



15th ward free soil league. 143 

questions, fellow citizens, wliicli it were well for us had 
they never to be asked of a people who are living upon 
the fruits of their virtues ; of a people whose land is 
covered with the bounty, and whose history is filled with 
the glory of considerate ancestors : questions which 
Southern recklessness and Southern selfishness have forced 
upon us, and which nothing but ^Northern rectitude and 
l^orthern prudence can determine. 

For the first time in the history of popular elections 
we join issue upon the public morality. For the first 
time in the history of party confiicts we present the sin- 
gular spectacle of a nation most divided upon what best 
preserves it. How melancholy is the reflection, that in a 
country settled by Christians, and guarded by patriots, it 
should be necessary to organize a separate party for the 
rescue of a single virtue ; to lay down our old issues, to 
abandon old friends, to forego the predilections of habit- 
ual association, and hasten to the relief of a tottering 
principle, which, if it falls, must carry with it whatever is 
valuable in opinions, whatever is attractive in friendship, 
or tenacious in customs : that for placing ourselves upon 
the bark of the "Wilmot Proviso, the only party which has 
dared to meet the elements of political intolerance, in 
order to save the justice of the state, we should be 
denied a landing in face of an harbor, denied an existence 
in spite of the power with which we held our re^^roach, 
threatened with the vengeance of one party, and assured 
of the triumph of another, because we dared to be inde- 
pendent of both. 

Mr. Webster, in his late speech, treats our pretensions 
as a party with as little ceremony as the Whig party does 
his own claims to their favors. With an oracular assur- 
ance, pardonable in confirmed intelligence, he has an- 
nounced to his friends the gratifying information that his 



144 SPEECH BEFOEE THE 

old acquaintance, General Cass, and liis new favorite. 
General Taylor, are the only two candidates who intend 
to trouble this goodly people for their suffrages : with a 
wave of his august linger he does not merel}'' summon Mr. 
Yan Buren jfrom his high pedestal, and like the injured 
fairy, order him to occupy some less distinguished position, 
to assume some less honorable shape, to pass from a man 
to a beast or reptile or creeping vermin ; oh, no ! he is 
even less considerate than the vengeful enchantress, he is 
not even so thoughtful as to relieve disease and nature at 
some future day of the trouble of disembodying him, not 
he. He must deny that such a candidate or his party 
ever had existed, or ever could exist. 

Perhaps Mr. Webster intended us to believe that if 
he had ever recognized us as a party, it was not from 
facts furnished by his memory, but a phantom which ex- 
pired with the gleam of fancy that created it. 

That if he ever had appeared anxious lest the Free 
Soil question should absorb the best strength of his party, 
and had stimulated him to apply his masterly energies to 
an unwonted extent, it was rather to exhibit his own skill 
in the legerdemain of politics, by making things that 
could not be, seem as though they had been — to show 
what might be said of such a party, if it had existed. As 
skilful pugilists sometimes practise themselves, by as- 
suming attitudes, and squaring scientifically at supposed 
antagonists, who would certainly have been floored, had 
they been present to receive the blows. 

Mr. Webster no doubt has brains enough to colonize 
another Olympus, but I doubt much wdiether the weight 
of his logic, ponderous as it is, could crush a fact. There 
have been Eastern despots who indulged themselves every 
mornino; with the merciful amusement of cuttins; off the 
heads of the faithful. They have an illustrious rival in 



15th ward free soil league. 145 

our own oriental Daniel, who, with one sweep of his 
lingual scythe, mows down thousands of the sturdy 
democracy who crowd this fair republic-, from the waters 
of the St. Lawrence to the Missouri. If we are no x^arty, 
having no principles, and no being, why do opposition 
orators expend so many arguments to preserve their adhe- 
rents from contact with this nonentity ? Why charge a 
cannon to break a bubble? "Why fulminate anathemas 
against a creedless, bodiless heresy ? 

Surely there must be something worthy of counte- 
nance, something not altogether too insignificant for 
investigation in a cause which is most supported when 
best understood ; which finds its firmest advocates among 
its severest critics; which, though still cramped and 
crowded by the pressure of opposing factions, is constantly 
appropriating to itself the better opinion of men, and 
reciprocating the service which, secures a warm ally, by 
furnishing the converted with a creed so comprehensive 
and elevated that he will never be ashamed of it. If 
principles are to be adjudged by the character of those 
who advocate them, who are the exponents of this rebel 
faith ? Who the actors in tliis grand drama of jDolitical 
and social redemption ? It is not the politician panting for 
jjatronage ; the signs are too inauspicious for the gratifica- 
tion of his voracity. 

It is not the man- worshipper whose home is at tlie 
hero's feet. Pie has a windfall from Mexico, and has 
already placed liimself in his favorite dust. It is not 
the strict, undeviating, habitual partisan who sees no 
merit in public conduct worthy of his emulation, beyond 
the limits of party acquiescence ; he has his duty marked 
out and ratified before his candidate is proclaimed, and 
will support him, no matter how iniquitous the means by 
which that nomination was secured. No, it is not sueh 
10 



146 SPEECH BEFORE THE 

V 

as these who fraternize with us, and for the simple reason, 
that for the present, we can only furnish them with that 
wliich is but a poor recompense to the selfish, a good con- 
science. We have no splendid military chieftain to allure, 
by aggressive triumphs, followers whom the naked merits 
of his cause never could seduce. We have no candidate 
for the chief ofiice who was born of a convention which 
purported to sanction old established party usages, and to 
represent and respect the united democracy of this whole 
Union, and who, in violation of both usages and opinions, 
shut out the largest single delegation in that Union from 
a participation in the solemn objects of its congregation. 

We have nothing about us to attract the greedy, the 
senseless, or the timid. Our position requires too much 
reasoning for the thoughtless to comprehend, and is an 
undertaking fixr more hazardous than the nervous or the 
yielding dare attempt. Our advocates are those who 
have too little immediate interest in the success of either 
of the two great parties not to abandon both at the 
moment they perceive any other means of benefiting 
their country. 

To assume any other relations, to advocate any other 
questions, and to organize any other system of political 
action whenever the policy of the party to which they are 
attached is found insuflicient to further the permanent 
interests of the whole nation. That man who deserts his 
party when that party deserts its duty will never suffer 
his politics to place his morals in jeopardy. The greater 
part of those who advocate our cause are men who have 
never been jostled from their propriety by the thunders 
of a noisy reputation, who will never be diverted from 
healthy avocations either to assume the defence of ques- 
tionable doctrines, or to place their fortunes at the dis- 
posal of a capricious multitude. Their good sense is too 



15th ward free soil league. 147 

strong for the sophistries of party, and useful pursuits 
place them above tlie temptation of patronage. Tlieir 
fidelity cannot be questioned, because it is only tendered 
until conscience summons it elsewhere. Its travelling 
clothes are always upon its back, and at the first beck of 
truth it sets out for a more congenial residence. We have 
men among us sternly and boldly enlisted in this cause, 
who in ordinary times are known only as the pliant, 
placable servants of the law ; who are noted for the fidelity 
with which they discharge social duties, and the modesty 
with which they shrink from public honors ; who never 
intrude their opinions upon the state, when its safety can 
dispense wnth them, and who from a contented and a re- 
spected retirement behold with unconcern the successive 
dynasties of the popular will, like the stately figures of a 
magic lantern, in rapid and regular order, advancing from 
the midst and retiring back into the bosom of the people. 
Yet when this goodly land is threatened with near im- 
pending danger, and its children are summoned to shield 
the purest of governments from the plunder of solemnly 
sanctioned powers, these are the men whose dormai. 
sovereignty awakes at the call, and are the first to tender 
the long-reserved suftrages for the support of the public 
necessities. There is the minister of God, who will not 
rest in his pulpit until he has deposited his^vote in fuvor 
of that virtue which his life is sworn to defend. There is 
the scholar, who will consider his time and his oil wasted 
until he has added his mite in our behalf; for the study 
of all men, in all ages, has taught him the value of the 
principles for which we contend. There is the poet, 
whom we will summon from his dreams of more perfect 
institutions, to secure those he already possesses from 
spoliation. There is the Christian, whose daily prayer 
ascends heavenward upon the breath of liberated piety. 



148 SPEECH BEFORE THE 

Grateful for his own emancipation, lie will not forget the 
cause which would arrest a more grievous oppression. 
The philosopher, who, in his deepest meditations still 
finds virtue the profoundest wisdom, — he will make that 
result the guide of his political conduct, and it will place 
him by our side. The free laborer, who, even in the 
homeliness of his occupation, remembers the dignity of his 
nature, — he will hold his plough firmer and his head 
higher, when he has voted for that party which would 
relieve him from the bondsman's company by redressing 
the bondsman's wrongs. Those men will be with us who 
have no prejudices against a new cause because it confides 
in old names ; and those names grown venerable in long 
and effectual public service; who have the patience to 
investigate a good cause, and conscience enough to em- 
brace it, when abundant arguments are advanced in its 
favor. Conscientious Whigs, conscientious Democrats, 
who can see nothing so alluring in either of the two great 
parties, to deter them from the united support of prin- 
ciples which it is the first interest of both parties to 
advocate, and which both parties have agreed to abandon ; 
who look upon the questions of financial policy which for- 
merly separated them, as lost, in comparison with the 
holier ones which now sanctify their union. The former 
are temporary expedients to meet present emergencies, 
while the latter are comprehensive principles which sus- 
tain eternal laws. Tlie most splendid schemes ever 
devised for advancing the fortunes of this prudent, indus- 
trious, aspiring nation, are but poor substitutes for the 
loss of their virtue. 

The world will forgive us mistakes in matters of ordi- 
nary policy, and in pitying our ignorance will pardon our 
blunders; but who will be the champion of abandoned 
rectitude ? AYho dare vindicate the ravisher of his conn- 



15th ward free soil league. 149 

try's fame ? Is tliis mere declamation ? Let us see if the 
facts are not as large as the words that cover them. The 
South claim the right to carry the local institution of 
slavery into the territory belonging to the whole Union. 
In the name of morality and our own personal interest, in 
common with the other States, in that territory, we assert 
our right through the general Congress to prevent it. 
The main arguments in support of this right the country 
have by heart. I cannot improve upon them. Yet there 
are a few of the stronger points which cannot be too often 
repeated. Wherever in the Constitution the slaveholder 
resorts for his slave privileges, that instrument calls them 
by no other name than persons. There are but two 
clauses in his favor. The one clause legalizes the posses- 
sion. It is tlms : JSTo person held to service in one State 
shall be released from the same by the law of any other 
State. The other clause is the granary where he picks 
the seed which grows the representative. It says : After 
citizens, three-fifths of all other persons, except Indians, 
shall be included in the ratio of representation, ISTo men- 
tion is made of property held to service. Neither does it 
say three-fifths of all other property shall be represented. 

When tlie tax-gatherer comes to assess the planter, lie 
ranges his slave by the side of his horse, his dog, and his 
cow, and points to them as a part of his personal estate. 
Wlien the census-taker approaches, this slave is led out 
from among tlie four-footed tribe, and placed within the 
family group by the side of his wife, his sons, and his 
daughters, and numbered as a part of his human house- 
hold — for while in the presence of that officer the slave 
is three-fifths of a man. After assisting to make a repre- 
sentative he goes back to liis barn-yard brethren, and 
renews the toil wliich furnishes the means to pay that 
representative for extending and perpetuating the misery 



150 SPEECH BEFORE Tm: 

of his race. What a pleasant occupation for a human 
being — to employ three-fifths of his manhood in making 
himself a Trhole slave. 

I do not mention this as a matter of reproach, for I 
believe within certain limits it is unavoidable at present. 
But when the South attempts to reduce slaves to the level 
of ordinary property, to amalgamate them among things, 
to dress them up as utensils, and in this disguise to smug- 
gle them through the Constitution into the territory of the 
whole nation, where we hold them as contraband, every 
weapon, whether it be of satire, ridicule or reproach, is 
legal till we drive them over the border into their own 
exclusive local jurisdiction. 

In all discussions upon the extension of slavery, we 
must never forget to summon the moral law to our assis- 
tance the moment its supremacy can be applied without 
interfering with positive enactments. When the South, 
as in the case of slave property, can only resort to implica- 
tion to prove that slaves are property in its strict sense, 
we have the right to apply the moral law and say, that 
what the necessities of the Constitution have not granted, 
in the name of justice we claim the benefit of in our own 
favor. Tills is the only law which will ever decide the 
contest for us. Otherwise it is an equal question. For 
the supremacy of this moral law is never abrogated ; it is 
only adjourned temj^orarily to avoid greater evils, and by 
recognizing the moral law as holding the balance of power 
between the constitutional law as expressed and the same 
as implied, we secure an eflncient ally in concluding this 
question adversely for the South. 

In all matters of general policy afiecting general 
interests, a moderate exercise of implied powers is absolute- 
ly necessary to carry on the government ; and upon this 
very principle, by admitting implied powers as to this 



15th ward free soil league. 151 

question, we encourage slave institutions. There is suffi- 
cient j)ositive authority in the Constitution given them to 
protect their rights within the States. Any farther, they 
must expect no mercy. 

Every slave sanctioned by the general government in 
the Territories is a slave of our own, protected by our own 
laws, working upon our own soil, and covering us with the 
same infamy as if he was in our own kitchen. All tiie 
acts of tlie general government are our acts, and the 
moment that slavery passes from under the exclusive 
jurisdiction of the States, it becomes a common pestilence, 
and every white man is a slaveholder, from Canada to 
California. It is the extreme absoluteness of State sover- 
eignty that saves us now. And the world knows this. 
But place one foot of slavery upon the soil of the national 
domain, and though it be but a handful of dirt, you will 
bury in it the shrivelled corpse of the public honor. You 
may run the boundary line between the States and the 
Territory with your finger : the moral distance between 
them upon this question is as boundless as the heavens 
which made the moral law. In the presence of State 
sovereignty, the federal government should be only a 
mournful, powerless spectator. When it reaches the Terri- 
tory its responsibility is resumed. And in the name of 
the public probity we call upon it to arrest this public 
iniquity. The South tells us that their honor is at stake 
upon this question. That nothing can save it but the dis- 
honor of the whole confederacy. This is pleasant news 
for the North. That nothing less than a Tartar expedition 
into the consciences of ten millions of men can appease 
their affronted nature. We always supposed that honor 
was the dignity which preserved what virtue had acquired, 
and not the recklessness which gloried in its loss ; that it 
was not only the discipline but the jealousy of reputation, 



152 SPEECH BEFORE THE 

\ 

not content with being correct but mnst needs be sensitive. 
While we possess onr faculties we have a right to our 
opinions, and we at the Korth believe that a truth is as 
valuable as a negro. That a prostrate principle is as 
melancholy a spectacle as a down-trodden man, and that 
misfortune in bondage is far less to be pitied than freedom 
in disgrace ; for the one has only lost its rights, the other 
has forgotten its duties. If we authorize extension of tliis 
iniquity, whoever calls us free will be declared mad. 
Whoever cites us as an example for imitation, will be 
shunned as the apostle of deception. Wherever our flag 
waves it will be the herald of infamy. Wherever our 
name is pronounced it will be the signal for reprehension. 
The world will be the wiser of our liberties only because 
in the worthlessness of the achievement they will be con- 
soled for their own loss. While Europe has begun a 
contest for what we have eftected, we are contending 
against the spirit of the very evils which tliey have almost 
demolished. Is it not one argument the more for the 
oppressor, and one argument the less for the oppressed, 
that in the heart of the freest country upon the earth an 
acrimonious struggle is raging to perpetuate the bondage 
of a race whom the greatest powers of despotic Euroj^e 
have spent millions to redeem ? Are not all the thrones 
of Europe redolent with the new-blown flowers of conces- 
sion ? and though some of them have sprouted just in time 
to deck royalty for the sacrifice, may not this simoom blast 
of slavery extension from the western continent wither up 
these flowers and sweep back the desert where an Eden 
had just begmi to bloom ? Yet why should we invoke the 
pride of the people, or the safety of the world, in behalf 
of the Wilraot Proviso, if gratitude for those who made us 
what we are will avail nothing ? Who is the author of 
this ordinance ? The author of the Declaration of Inde- 



15th ward free soil league. 153 

peiidence. Who sanctioned it with his signature ? The 
father of his country. Is there a Democrat who reveres 
the memory of the man who has furnished him with a 
creed which has enabled him almost since the foundation 
of the government to triumph over every faction or party 
arrayed in hostility against him ; is there a man, I say, 
that will believe there can be anything unsound in this 
measure, where all the rest he has received from the same 
source are so durable ? Who is there so presumptuous ? 
Who is there so blasphemous, as will dare to reflect upon 
the wisdom of Washington ? Would he who gave us an 
Empire, inflict upon us an injury ? Is the South insulted 
by its best defender, and he who was one of their own 
brethren in interest and in locality ? Away with the 
sacrilege. When we ask you to pass upon this proviso, 
we ask you to acknowledge that your two greatest bene- 
factors were not your greatest blunderers ; to prove your 
gratitude for what you have by sanctioning that which in 
their good judgment they approved. If our voices avail 
nothing, let the spirit of the departed good be heard. If 
you will not hear us rebels, listen for God's sake, listen to 
the Patriots who made you what you are. 

As for us we are condemned before we are heard — if 
we speak of principles, we are told of treason ; if we point 
to good men who are worthy of support at this election, 
we are told that they want votes to jnstify wrongs, and 
not to advance truths ; that Mr. Yan Buren w^ould break 
down his party because it would not raise him upon its 
shoulders ; that Judas and Arnold are patriots by the side 
of hira. When they call Mr. "Van Buren a traitor to them, 
they call him truly ; for in this treachery to infamy is 
fidelity to virtue. When they say that Mr. Van Buren 
is ungrateful because he wall not be unscrupulous, they 
only prove that he has chosen rather to preserve his re 



154 SPEECH BEFOKE THE 

spect for what lie believes to be the right than his gratitude 
towards those whom he knows to be wrong. What an 
awful crime — what a valid excuse for persecution — that a 
man should prefer a frowning party to a reproving con- 
science! We know that there are many who have a 
strong prejudice against Mr, Van Buren, yet we never 
found a man who could give a valid reason why. Has he 
the mind capable of conducting the head of the state? 
Yes. Did you ever know him guilty, either in or out of 
office, of an unworthy act ? , Oh, no. Well, then, why do 
you dislike him ? Why, they call him a fox, he looks so 
cunning. A man to be popular in this country must 
either be a great general or a great orator. Men must 
either be excited by words or by military deeds. Mr. 
Yan Buren is neither, but he is far safer than both. Cool, 
discriminating and determined, his passions never interfere 
with his perceptions. You never become enthusiastic 
enough in his favor to follow him right or wrong. When 
you follow him you may be sure you are nearly right — 
you may be sure that you are not led away by anything 
beyond the influence of the cause which he represents. 
His judgment is too omnipresent ever to mislead your 
own — his integrity too well tried ever to betray you into 
crime. Yet he is only a man — a fallible man, after all. 
Will men refuse to advocate a cause which their consciences 
approve, merely because there is a man at the head of it 
who, after thirty long years of honorable public service, 
has, by a few mistakes, proved that he is no exception to 
the best men who have gone before him ? Whenever you 
go to prove his inconsistency, you prove his veracity. He 
may have changed his mind, but did he ever break his 
word ? In '36 he thought that slavery in the District of 
Columbia ought not to be disturbed, and it was not ; in 
'48 it is his opinion that it should not be extended, and 



15th waed free soil league. 155 

will lie not adhere to it ? Half the enmity lie now pro- 
vokes has been caused by the calumny he has refuted. 
The contest of '40, which consigned him to retirement, 
brought more subsequent disgrace upon this land than it 
did upon its rejected chief. If there is a Whig wlio feels 
despondent over tlie mournful retrospect which the last 
eight years of his country's history presents, let him go 
back to the ballot-box of '40, and behold the source of his 
grief. All the evils since that period are but the rebound 
from the state house of his inconsiderate safFrage. Bad 
laws are the errors of men coming back to them on un- 
gratified wants, unprotected interests, and disregarded 
opinions. What a ludicrous sight it would be, say some, 
to see Mr. Yan Buren at the head of the Whig party. Not 
half so much so as to see General Taylor at the head of 
any political party. In Mr. Yan Buren's case people 
would say, what a magnanimous party are the Whigs. 
They refuse to vote for a man who never was heard of till 
blood was to be shed. Who advised an advance into his 
neighbor's territory. Who acknowledged that he knows 
nothing of civil affairs. Who, if he is elected, will be the 
first General ever seated in the chair of state as a reward 
for aggressive triumphs. That they have forgotten their 
minor differences, and united upon a candidate whose 
ordinary policy had alwa3^s sejDarated them, but whom, 
when the country is in danger, they are Villing to unite 
upon as the least obnoxious of the three. 

When could men with more safety or propriety aban- 
don their party than those who adhere to Whig principles ? 
They could not hazard their fidelity, for their candidate 
has no right to exact what he does not observe. A par- 
tisan is not to be censured for abandoning a candidate who 
represents nothing, when his party have set him the 
example of ingratitude by rejecting their greatest states- 



156 SPEECH BEFORE THE 

man, on whom all the burthen of supporting tlieu* cause 
eventually falls. The country, which is the great object 
of the honest partisan's efforts, will not be injured by 
secession, for it is happily accommodating itself to demo- 
cratic measures. The tariff sleeps in the security of a 
moderate reduction. The question of the distribution of 
the proceeds of the public lands is as quiet as the solitudes 
which it embraces. The bank is quietly crumbling amid 
the rest of the ruins of Whig policy ; and in the certainty 
of a secure, prosperous financial policy, when could we 
more oj^portunely begin the purgation of the pubhc morals ? 

I am aware of the difficulty of arraying the people's 
duties against the people's favorites. I know the hope- 
lessness of calling the elector away from the worshipper. 
Strong indeed must be that logic which can wrestle with 
a soldier's glory. Bold as the courage which produced 
that soldier's renown, must be the spirit that dares oppose 
it. General Taylor's talents may be as lofty as the station 
to which he aspires, and his estimate of those talents may 
be as humble as the obscurit}^ from which he spnmg, yet 
let him wait • till he has proved, in some less important 
station, that he ha^ them, and let him convince us of 
his modesty in some more satisfactory manner than by 
consenting to assume what he acknowledges he cannot 
perform. Tlie state wants experience, not experiments. 
Reward men for what they will be, when you have none 
to honor for what they liave been. 

"What right have we to look towards an inexperienced 
chieftain for a sagacious exercise of the vast executive 
influence of this republic ? If he is independent, that in- 
experience will mislead him. If he is confiding, he will 
be distracted by opposing counsels. In either case the 
country must be the sufferer. The world has taught us to 
distrust the wisdom of the sword. The sagacity which 



15th ward free soil league. 157 

conducted an army to victory, lias often led a state to 
ruin. Look at ISTapoleon, with all the power of Euroj^e at 
his feet, and all the wisdom of France at his ear, whose 
arm was constantly called upon to repair the mischiefs his 
head had provoked, stepping down from the most splendid 
throne in the universe, and wading through Russian snows 
to an English prison. The most ungrateful act that ever 
English gratitude perpetrated towards a great name, was 
in placing Wellington at the head of the English govern- 
ment. Wlio would believe that he who utters such silly 
sophisms in the House of Lords, was the conqueror of 
]^apoleon ? That he who contributed so much to the 
nation's glory was so little able to benefit it by his coun- 
sels? Yet, in battle he was equally as masterly in his 
plans, clear, shrewd, determined, as General Taylor. 
Military men are generally too ignorant to lead, or too 
obstinate to follow, and we do not see why men who have 
had no other training in any other school, should be an 
exception. Washington and Jackson were botli men who 
had acquired much civil experience before coming to the 
Presidency. Will General Taylor keep us out of a foreign 
war ? His poor neglected brother-in-arms. General Scott, 
has just successfully concluded one, which the advice of 
this General Taylor produced. Will he be guarded and 
able to command himself in power ? He could not contain 
his temper towards his superior, the Secretary of War ; 
how will he act then, when there are none above him ? 

But in regard to the war, he only obeyed orders. Yes, 
and he advised those orders, and if he did not, when was 
obedience to error a qualification for office ? When was 
participation in the worst of iniquities an argument for the 
assumption of the highest of dignities ? As a soldier he 
cannot be praised too much, though in a bad cause. Wo 
have spent 200,000,000 of dollars to tell the world two 



158 SPEECH BEFORE THE . 

facts : — That our soldiers are no cowards and our rulers no 
statesmen. That if the one never march but to conquer, 
the others have acted but to blunder. That while igno- 
rance at Washington was writing its way to infamy, valor 
in Mexico was cutting its way to glory. General Taylor 
performed a soldier's duty, and obtained a soldier's reward 
— promotion and the praise of the achievement. But 
when he comes before the country as an aspirant for civil 
and political honors, he must be adjudged by the laws of 
morality and good policy which govern these dignities — 
and they are against him. The Whigs tell us that he will 
not veto the Wilmot proviso. Let us hear that from him. 
He is either opposed to it, or ashamed to advocate it. In 
either case he is not worthy of our support. Yet with all 
these arguments in our favor, men excuse themselves for 
standing aloof from us. It's all revenge, you don't mean 
it. — Granted we do not, does that justify you in not em- 
bracing a good cause, because there are those in it who 
avenge the wrongs of the politician, by performing the 
duties of the Christian ? Were we ambitious of power and 
reckless of the means of obtaining it, how could it be 
better secured than by coalescing with them, whom per- 
haps it has cost us our ascendency to abjure? Could we 
not have swallowed the insult which denied us a participa- 
tion in the selection of a candidate, in the hopes of that 
patronage which would have resulted from the certainty 
of his election ? Would not injuries forgotten at Baltimore 
have insured favors at Washington ? 

Had we frowned upon the Wilmot proviso, would not 
success have smiled upon us, and our integTitj', though in 
ruins, been gilded by the beams of perpetuated power ? 
Wfts it good policy to hazard our own safety as the price 
of their retribution ? To jeopardize our character in order 
to justify our position? Does it betray the ordinary 



15th ward free soil league. 159 

cunning of systematic vindictiveness to incur all the odium 
of opposition to former friends without the right to expect 
anything from those whom we benefited by this movement 
and who have always been our enemies ? Are not these 
the arguments with whicli a calculating rancor would 
have silenced the voice of a heedless, clamorous retaliation, 
and thus preserve us from becoming martyrs to our own 
resentment rather than what we are, the vindicators of 
outraged i)arty privileges and menaced public virtue ? 

Long-drawn and deeply indented are the lines between 
us and reconciliation with those who have provoked the 
alternative of this secession ; lines as wide as the continent 
we inhabit, and deep as the waters which wash its borders. 
We have harbored an outlaw from the capitol, and we 
will not betray it; we have taken a. great truth by the 
hand and sent it forth to fight its way to empire. It is 
already crowned in the consciences of men. The Whigs 
tell us that for twenty years they have been the advocates 
of the Free Soil question ; — what a lucky thing for them 
that the rent in our own party should have revealed to the 
world their long-curtained virtue, — if we effect nothing 
else by this insular organization we shall be more than 
compensated for our pains. 

Suppose the fathers of the Eevolution had only thought 
of liberty seventy years ago, without arming themselves 
in its defence, what would have been the value of our 
rights? It is not enough that we are persecuted for what 
we espouse, but we must be plundered of that which is all 
that consoles us under the infliction. Do the Whigs mean 
that they supported the Missouri Compromise of 1820 ? 
Is it possible that they should have countenanced that 
measure before they were recognized as a party? But I 
forgot. Mr. Webster, who explained so convincingly how 
we, a party in a flourishing condition, did not exist, may 



160 SPEECH BEFORE THE 

\ 

perhaps be equally as lucid in settling how the Whigs could 
have a creed before they -were endowed with a being. 
This compromise is the principle of the proviso admitted, 
though partially applied ; it is the gravity of truth 
suspended in its southward course; the diameter of the 
republic is made the boundary of tlie benefit; but the 
Wilmot proviso is the compromise winged, soaring and 
lighting over the neglected residue of the whole national 
territory. Can a party long remain unacknowledged and 
unsupported, who have placed themselves at issue upon 
the only principle worth contending for at this election ? 
We will not believe that the state, like Lot's wife, will 
look back, and become a pillar of salt. Yet if we should 
fail, if we do fall, we will go down with the wreck of the 
laws ; we will be buried in the sarcophagus of the Consti- 
tution; the robes of justice will be our winding-sheet, and 
every good man our pall bearer, while, as triumphant 
infamy hurries us to the grave, the world will cry out : 
" there goes the funeral of America's virtue ! " Yet we will 
not indulge in so mournful an anticipation ; we are too 
proud of the past to despair of the future ; we have en- 
countered and survived too many dangers in the building 
up of this splendid system of government, not to be equally 
sanguine of a like happy conclusion to our difficulties. As 
for the South, her threaten ings have been so constant and 
yet so harmless, that we would bear with her as with a 
fretful, wayward child. The country has become used to 
her whinings, and the voice of threats, commencing with 
the Washington administration, have continued, with little 
interval, down to the present time ; but the terrors of the 
child are no longer the arguments of the man ; we laugh 
where in earlier days we trembled. This measure will 
yet be her master, and though, as we journey toward the 
far limits of this vast empire, we encounter on our path 



15th ward free soil league. 161 

the tree of virtue blown down and stretching its withered 
branches over the whole Southern extent of this confed- 
eracy, yet we will pluck a bough from its prostrate trunk 
and transplant it upon the soil of the national territory, 
where it will strike its roots so deep and strong that all 
the blasts of a future corrupt State sovereignty will sweep 
harmlessly over it. 

Pass this measure and an angel might envy its mission, 
for it is the spirit which made us free, trying to keep us 
just. It would snatch a kindly beam from the sun of 
power, to play upon the pathway of tlie degenerate 
African. Pass it, and no more will envy taunt you with 
inconsistency, for it is the tear of the penitent blotting out 
the sins of the delinquent. Pass it, for God's sake, pass 
it, and the prosperity of this land will no longer be a re- 
proach upon its humanity, for it is the fortunes of one race 
repairing the ruins of another. Our privileges have made 
our opinions valuable. Within the circuit of those opinions 
the Constitution has imprisoned the powers of the State, 
and it remains for you to prove whether that act was a 
wise provision or a rash adventure. From the merciless 
peltings of this southerly storm, its perilled prerogatives 
seek a shelter under the wing of your suffrages. Deeply 
indeed must the free soil voter feel the weight of that 
suffrage, when in its folds are wrapped his country's honor 
and his fellow's right. 

We have proved that crowns are not essential to 
laws ; let us prove also that chains are not necessary to 
labor. That as our government has all the energy with- 
out the oppression of despotism, so industry can be equally 
as useful without being miserable. Better that liberty 
had always remained a beautiful theory than to have be- 
come a deformed and degraded reality, stalking over this 
continent to degrade labor, to oppress misfortune, and to 
11 



162 SPEECH BEFORE THE FREE SOIL LEAGUE. 

prevent morality. We expect mucli of me coming session, 
if not of consummation, at least of encouragement. We 
are prepared for a winter's voyage around this Southern 
cape ; it may be a long and boisterous passage, but we 
shall weather the Horn. We will be the first to bear the 
glad tidings of redemption to the new-born empire of the 
Pacific, and it will be a more precious cargo than the 
richest clime will send them in the proudest days of its 
future glory, for it will proclaim the unqualified, uncom- 
promising recognition of the spirit of human liberty. 



ORA.TION 

DELIVERED AT 

BERGEN POINT, N. J., 

JULY 4TH, 1845. 



Fellow-Citizens : 

The story of oar country's wrongs, its sufferings and 
its triumplis, tliougli often and eloquently told, is still a 
theme that cannot weary — it is a tale that must not be 
forgotten. Though we shared not in the glory of the 
achievement ; though we perilled neither life nor limb in 
the defence of man's dearest blessing ; though we had no 
hand in rearing the complicated fabric of a mighty Re- 
public, still, to those who accomplished all this, should we 
not evince our gratitude by a lively remembrance of their 
virtues, and by a faithful guardianship over, those liberties 
which they lavished their blood and treasure to secure ? 
to whose resolution we are indebted for the festivities of 
this day, and to whose valor and wisdom w^e owe the 
success of this age ? Bear with me, then, while, upon the 
Sabbath-day of our freedom, I discharge, in your name, 
the annual debt of our common gratitude. Come with me 
to the altar of patriotism, while we offer up the incense of 
heartfelt praise to the authors of our country's glory. Let 



164 ORATION DELIVERED AT 

US assemble around the table of Memory, and while we 
banquet upon the good deeds of others, may we grow good 
ourselves by that on which we feed. Why are the reminis- 
cences of the Revolution so pleasing ? Why is it that the 
jubilee of our Indej)endence, like some antique relic, grows 
dearer as it grows older ? Do we merely commemorate 
the transfer of Governmental cares and burthens from a 
foreign to a domestic head ? Do we merely rejoice that a 
courageous ancestry dared to pluck the brightest jewel 
from a vain monarcli's diadem ? Are we tickled witb the 
childish pleasure of escaping the restraints of parental 
discipline and the unnatural rigors of parental authority ? 
Do we merely honor men for resisting when they could 
no longer obey ? Was it a mark of magnanimity, or any 
evidence of patriotism, in the leaders of that contest to 
defend what it was their interest to preserve ; to exert 
their intellects, to weary their spirits, and to task their 
bodies, in order to consummate an event which but 
furnished the readier means to gratify personal ambition, 
and to increase individual power ? Who knew but what 
they were asserting the rights of their countrymen only 
that they might, with the more facihty, abuse them? 
Who knew but what they were expelling the oppressor, 
only that they might rule the oppressed? How many 
ambitious spirits, masked in the garb of patriotism and 
clothed in the panoply of a sacred cause, have battled in 
the name of Freedom, that they might govern in the name 
of Tyranny ! How many deluded nations have succeeded 
in rearing the Temple of Liberty, and yet how few have 
feasted their eyes upon the fair spectacle, ere vice and 
corruption, undermining the beautiful edifice, have erected, 
upon its crumbling ruins, the sternest desj)otism that human 
ingenuity could devise ! No, my friends, it is neither the 
spirit that provoked, nor the ability that achieved this 



BERGEN POINT, N. J., 1845. 165 

revolution, upon which we waste the eulogy of our praise ; 
it is the wisdom that planned, the virtue that preserved, 
and the integrity that bequeathed to us that sacred charter, 
without which all revolutions are vain, and submission 
preferable to resistance. It was this disinterestedness, this 
patriotic devotion to posterity and their country, that dis- 
tinguished our ancestors from the vulgar herd of mere 
revolutionists. With them, place and power were only 
instruments to effect national independence and individual 
prosperity. For our rest they labored ; for our peace they 
warred ; for our freedom they conquered. And when a 
kind Providence, a worthy cause, and an undaunted spirit, 
had enabled them to secure the adoption of those demo- 
cratic institutions contended for, they drop, one by one, 
from the high places to which their merits had exalted 
them, to mingle with a multitude they had redeemed, to 
watch the operations of a Government they had constituted, 
to share in its blessings, and, by exemplifying in themselves 
its equality, to enjoy that living Apotheosis, the reward 
of virtue and the result of patriotism. 

There is a distinctness of feature, a peculiar originality 
of character, exhibited in the nature and origin of this 
Revolution, to which history furnishes no parallel ; and 
the oftener we reflect, and the deeper we study both its 
causes and its results, the firmer will be the conviction 
that a mightier hand than man's, a keener eye than ours, 
had marked out, guided, and still watches the destinies of 
this young Republic. A few generations since, and the 
land we inhabit found not a place in the imagination of 
the wildest visionary. History refused it a page upon her 
tablets ; and when civilized man beheld the sun sinking in 
the distant west, he fancied that it but slept upon the 
bosom of the boundless waters, unconscious that the mighty 
orb smiled upon and vivified a world as vast, a land as 



166 ORATION DELIVERED AT 

beautiful, and a people as mortal as his own. Crowded 
within the narrow compass of a limited territory — pros- 
trated by the weight of monarchical exactions, and the 
mental despotism of a crafty priesthood — almost exhausted 
in physical resources by the constant drain of an excessive 
populace, Euroj)e knew not that a mighty hemisphere was 
waiting to pour its treasures in her lap — to afford an asylum 
for her oppressed and a home for her sui-j^lus multitude ; 
thus restoring the fulcrum to the centre of an overbalanced 
globe, and applying to us the Bible promise, " I will give 
thee the heathen for an inheritance." But who is the 
leader to this promised land ? "Who the Moses to this 
second Canaan ? A friendless mariner, whose character 
is as doubtful as the countries he would discover, but 
whose project seemed little less than a divine inspiration. 
With a boldness equal to the magnitude of the under- 
taking, he looks the haughtiest of sovereigns in the face, 
and for the trifle of an outfit, offers to lay the wealth of 
another Indus at his feet. Doubting, and yet hoping, 
they equip him a fleet, in which your wateraien would 
hardly trade to Virginia. And yet there is a sublimity 
in that departure which one loves to contemplate. Pitied 
for his madness, ridiculed for his rashness, despised for his 
obstinacy, with no encouragement, save the instinctive 
promptings of an ardent imagination, this adventurous 
nobody launches upon the Atlantic's wide waste, to im- 
mortalize an obscure name, to enrich an ungrateful coun- 
try, and to prepare a road that ransomed millions might 
follow. Historians tell us that a redeemed people date 
their existence from the year 1Y76 ; but the world will 
acknowledge, that the first link in the great chain of 
events, which ended with the consummation of American 
Independence, was commenced in the year 1492. 

Had a Columbus never lived, tyranny would have 



BERGEN POINT, N, J., 1845. 167 

never died. Europe, the alpha and omega of Christian 
civilization, would have been the centre of a universal 
despotism, and man still crouched beneath the rod of 
power, sometimes kissing, but never escaping the hand 
that held him. The splendor of a throne, the pomp and 
state of royalty, the gorgeous trappings, and lavish dis- 
play of aristocratic wealth, dazzle the senses of the multi- 
tude, and are peculiar objects of admiration and worship. 
Accustomed from infancy to regard these privileged orders 
as superior beings, they may envy, but are always ready 
to fawn at the feet of power. It is only in a land far re- 
moved from such influences, whose crown is wisdom, 
whose mitre is purity, whose heraldry is talent, where an 
equality of rank produces an equality of rights, that man 
can fully assert the dignity of his nature, and enjoy free- 
dom in its true purity. Thus, while other nations have 
been for ages endeavoring to wring a few immunities from 
their masters, we, in less than a century, have sprang to 
the manly stature of freemen — the land of yesterday, and 
the people of to-day — the youngest in years, and yet the 
oldest in the enjoyment of all the true essentials of good 
government. What a pattern do we present for our elders ! 
What an example does the child hold up to the parent ! 
Liberty, with our ancestors, was a runaway match. The 
gentle goddess came to their mother's house, and pleased 
them with her mildness and the unrestrained ease of her 
manners. The parents perceived the attachment spring- 
ing up, and, with cruel severity, forbade the banns. ISTot 
to be deterred even by this obstacle, they clandestinely 
leave the paternal roof, and consummate, in the wilds of 
America, that union denied them at home — sealing the 
matrimonial bond with their blood, and testing, by their 
sufierings, the strength of their attachment — preferring a 
stormy sea, a forest- wild, a savage foe, to all the allure- 



168 ORATION DELIVERED 

ments of a home, wliose Churcli "was Bigotry and whose 
State was Tyranny. Is it to be wondered, then, that after 
encountering every peril and surmounting every obstacle, 
after raising their altars to that piety for which they had 
sacrificed so much, and after transplanting their vine and 
fig-tree far from the scenes of their childhood and those 
beloved ties which consecrate the domestic hearth, — is it 
to be wondered, I say, that wlien the destroyer comes, 
backed by the scalping Indian, to invade the sanctity of a 
retreat he had rendered necessary, that they should exhibit 
the same courage in defending a land which insured them 
the enjoyment of so many blessings, as they had in leaving 
one which denied them all — thus rising from the equi- 
vocal character of rebellious subjects to the conscious 
dignity of victorious freemen — and, in place of obscure 
colonists, unnoticed by the world, suddenly take their 
stand among the nations of the earth, to rival, and perhaps 
eclipse, the glory of their once lordly masters ? Thus, with 
nations as with individuals, does heaven make one the 
unwilling instrument of another's rise. 

The principle of democratic liberty, though intimately 
connected with the well-being of mankind, seems, previous 
to -our Revolution, to have been a mere speculative theory. 
Philosophy, with a knowing shake, denied that its adop- 
tion was possible, and Experience, with a quiet smile, 
pointed to the decayed models of Greece and Home as 
samples of instability. That a whole nation should be the 
property of one family, bequeathed from father to son, as 
so many personal chattels, had long become a fixed fact; 
and it was only when rash rulers innovated upon long- 
established customs, that imprisoned man forgot his chains, 
and dared to strike ; or, if the progress of knowledge and 
the dawn of an enlightened age, awakened him to a sense 
of his degradation, the instruments, and not the authors, 



BERGEN POINT, N. J,, 1845. 169 

of his infamy, were the objects of attack — deposing rulers 
and slaughtering kings, but leaving the law that made 
them unharmed. And yet, civil liberty was as dear to 
the masses as power was to the high-born : no matter how 
sunk in ignorance, or how debased by vice ; no matter 
how indistinct or how ill-digested the ideas, man still re- 
tains some notion of his rights and obligations as a social 
being. Compelled by his weakness, and attracted by his 
affections, to associate with his fellow, he feels the necessity 
for a restraining principle to curb the passions and protect 
the interests of society. Although wealth and intellect be 
unequally distributed ; although tastes, habits, and associa- 
tions exclude social companionship, still a community of 
interests, an aggregate mutual dependence upon each 
other, or reliance upon, and an accountability to the same 
kind Protector, should at least invite a political equality. 
With his obligations to society, comes another and a higher 
duty. What he is denied and what he enjoys from asso- 
ciation with man, concerns but his temporal and bodily 
relation. Whether he is to be happy or miserable here- 
after, according as he has made his peace with God, con- 
cerns his spiritual and eternal welfare. There is some 
palliative for Government interfering in the temporal 
affairs of men, for they have a bearing more or less affect- 
ing each other ; but to tear the veil of sanctity from the 
spirit's devotion — to invade the temple of his faith, and 
prescribe particular forms for his observance — to disturb 
the sacred communion of an immortal soul with its master- 
spirit, in order to enjoin any rules other than those con- 
tained in the inspired volume, is not only an outrage upon 
his feelings, but a sacrilege against his Maker. In society, 
man is but the integral part of a congregated mass, depen- 
dent upon, and affected by, whatever concerns it as a 
whole. In religion, he is the one independent being, in 



1*70 ORATION DELIVERED AT 

no way connected with his neighbor, and, although having 
a common origin, and liable to a common fate, jet inde- 
pendent in existence, independent in action, and indepen- 
dent in accountability. 

To appreciate properly the blessings we enjoy, to 
comprehend fully the causes which, in so brief a period, 
have effected so much for us politically, let us review the 
condition of some of the older nations of Europe, who have 
but survived the ferocity of barbaric times to become the 
victims to enlightened prejudices. Is there any real free- 
dom to be found among those petty republics scattered at 
intervals over Europe, like stagnant pools in a desert, 
which, instead of allaying, rather excite the thirst for a 
purer element — holding their charter at the will of some 
foreign potentate, or, at best, shaping their conduct as 
conduces most towards retaining the good-will of their 
most powerful neighbors ? England, a modern Colossus, 
ruling the waves with her trident, her freeholds with gold, 
her colonies with bayonets — whose power no arm can 
weaken, whose influence every nation will acknowledge, 
whose good-will all gladly court. Though the scene of an 
hundred rebellions, and the theatre of many revolutions ; 
though her hills have echoed with the thrilling cries of 
would-be freemen, and her green vales have drank the 
blood of her best and wisest heroes ; though every age 
weakens her power at home and adds her might abroad, 
in what consists the boasted liberties of Englishmen? 
Since the Invasion to the deposition of the Elder Stuarts, 
what advances have they made towards political regenera- 
tion 1 The boundaries of the kingly office are more clearly 
defined. The crown prerogatives are reduced to a mere 
routine of state ceremonies. The checks and balances of 
three independent orders in the State, each a guard upon 
the other, present a seeming equality of representation 



BERGEN POINT, N. J,, 1845. l7l 

that does not exist. What the king has lost in honor, the 
nobility have acquired in influence, and what the people 
have gained by a voice in the democratic branch, is hushed 
by the corruptions of the remaining two ; and so long as 
tliey love their rulers, and only hate their rule — so long as 
that passion for display and attachment to royalty still re- 
mains — so long as they writhe under the lash that stings, 
and yet admire the jeweled hand that wields the rod, so 
long will the day of their redemption be prolonged. 

The French, awakened to a spirit of independence by 
the radical tendency of their new philosophy — inflamed 
almost to madness by the oppressive exactions of their 
privileged orders, and stimulated to a like effort by our 
example, fondly imagined they would be equally success- 
ful. But unfortunately departing from that courtesy for 
which they are noted, like an old man who, in retaining 
the affections, loses the polish of his youth, they woo the 
timid goddess with so rough and brutal a courtship, that 
she shrinks from their embraces, and, with a shriek of 
horror, flies frantic from the land. Then follows the strife 
of contending passions, the downfall of the holy altar, the 
debauch of public morals, and a general prostration of the 
social fabric — bartering a mild tyranny for a terrible 
anarchy, and the sway of a gentle monarch for the bloody 
rule of a Jacobinical mob. Brood after brood of gloomy 
tyrants are fostered upon the land, until one giant-monster, 
mightier than all, rises at the moment of his country's 
deepest misery, to exalt her to the highest pitch of national 
glory. Here let us pause to contemj)late the character of 
two men, perhaps the greatest that ever impressed their 
genius upon any age. Washington and Kapoleon ! The 
sun of America's savior, rising in black clouds of political 
despotism, culminates to its zenith during the mists of a 
nation's uncertain struggles, but, slowly declining amid a 



172 ORATION DELIVERED AT 

golden blaze of victorious conflict, tinges the western 
horizon with the mild splendor of its virtues long after the 
orb itself had ceased to shine. AVhile an admiring world 
is lost in contemplating the beauty of this scene, a new 
sun is visible to the eastward ; its brilliant dawn, the 
wonder and delight of an age — its meridian beams, too 
dazzling for the eagle's gaze — its declining pathway, too 
tempestuous for the stormy-petrel's revel. Nature denied 
their births a kingly heritage, and yet both attained heights 
to which kings in vain aspire. Each originated in revolu- 
tionary convulsions, which neither created, but which both 
concluded. The one annihilating foreign domination, the 
other quelling domestic faction. Both arranged and 
liarmonized discordant masses — infusing into separate 
systems of governments a wisdom that equalized, and an 
energy that ensured the enjoyment of every political 
advantage. Thus far they are hand-in-hand — and posterity 
will blend their names in the common benefactions of two 
great nations. But here, too, they part : AVashington to 
lay his power at the feet of its legitimate source, the 
People ; Napoleon to wrest from his countrymen all they 
had not previously conceded. Washington's ambition is 
satiated with the happiness he had secured ; Napoleon's 
thirst for power — the blood of three millions could not 
quench. Virtue, thriving in a land of liberty, brought to 
the dying bed of Washington the consciousness of a well- 
spent life, while the murmuring pagans of a grateful nation 
sang the hero to a sweet repose. Ambition, swayed by 
matchless talents, dazzling the world while it exasperated 
its victims, confused the brain of Napoleon, expiring upon 
a captive's couch. In the heroes' deaths we read their 
lives. But if both have produced great physical results, 
the effect of their example will not be the least among the 
benefits conferred upon society. The one, a warning to 



BERGEN POINT, N. J,, 1845. 173 

posterity never to permit services, liowever valuable, or 
endowments, liowever rare, to seduce them into the relin- 
quishment of powers for the benefit of an individual, 
which should alone emanate from the bosom of society ; 
and to tyrants, the fact that however successful for a time 
may be the efforts of caballing ambition, yet the betrayal 
of a nation's trusts must result eventually in the with- 
drawal of that nation's support. America, happy in the 
possession of her liberties, but thrice blessed in the rich 
legacy of her Washington's virtues, will ever cherish them 
as a model for generous emulation, and as a standing 
monument to the triumph of all that is disinterested in 
patriotism, over the retention of that power which the 
confiding love of an adoring people would have warranted. 
"While we pay our tribute to the good and brave of 
other days ; while we linger around the green graves of 
those who achieved our liberties, let us not forget others 
who successfully maintained them when again invaded. 
While we raise the shout of gladness for the results we 
have gained, let us drop the tear of sorrow for the man 
we have lost — mingling the joyful emotions, which this 
day awakens, with the solemnities becoming the mournful 
event which the nation has so recently experienced. After 
filling the latest page of his country's history wnth deeds 
of renown ; after taming the wild spirit of savage insubor- 
dination, and driving the trained bands of Europe from 
the plains of Louisiana ; after attacking, with the same 
energy, the monster monopolies that had taken root within 
the body politic, and defending, with the same spirit, the 
violated honor of a land of which he was the conservator ; 
after encountering, with a like fortitude, the insidious 
attacks of malignant disease, and wrestling with unsubdued 
obstinacy against its slow, but certain, advances— the 
warrior statesman — the patriot Jackson — the man of iron 



174 ORATION DELIVERED AT 

will, falls before the fell destroyer. Goo's the only throne 
at which he would bend ; Death the only conqueror to 
whom he would yield — its sting soothed by the balm of 
Christian hope — its terrors hidden in the mantle of his 
virtues. While a bereaved kindred bear to the tomb all 
that remains of his mortality ; while a grief-bowed people 
weave funeral garlands to his memory, and, with solemn 
pageantry, pay funeral rites to his decease, the incense of 
his virtues will rise higher and higher, until diffused far 
and wide over the land he lived so long to love and honor. 
Well may America mourn, for she has lost her best and 
ablest champion ; Liberty, its most ardent advocate ; 
Democracy, an oracle " whose prophecy was inspiration," 
and to whose grave her votaries will repair as the Mecca 
of their political faith ; Party, a name whose magic wand 
healed all differences, allayed all prejudices — whose voice 
was oil to the troubled waters, and whose frown was a 
terror to faction. Though the breath of calumny sought 
to poison the atmosphere in which he lived, it will scarce 
breathe its venom upon the grave in which he is buried— 
that grave, the last monument to departed glory, covering 
all of him who was the latest and best of America's second 
era. But four years since, and we were called to mourn 
the fate of the lamented Haerison, who, winning the 
lam-el crown of victory upon the bloody field of Indian 
warfare, a grateful nation sought to deck with the insignia 
of its highest civic office. Scarce do a victorious party 
taste from his hands the bread of patronage, than, reeling 
beneath the weight of accumulated honors, he falls, bury- 
ing them with him in the tomb, leaving to his country 
but the good he had eflected, and bearing to his Maker 
the offerings of a believing and devoted heart. 

Is it not pleasing to see a people, noted for their party 
spirit, almost defacing their political landmarks, yielding 



BERGEN POINT, N. J., 1845. 175 

to the impulses of gratitude, and elevating, as it were, by 
acclamation, to the highest trusts in the hour of their pros- 
perity, men who were the first in their defence when 
doubt and danger hovered over the land ? While we em- 
balm them in our memories, and duly appreciate their 
services, let us not forget to keep a vigilant eye upon the 
institutions which were the object of them. Though to 
our ancestors belongs the praise of founding a Republic, 
let us deserve, at least, the credit of preserving one. The 
erection of Republics is no new fact — their perpetuation, 
both an ancient and a modern rarity. To belie the experi- 
ence of the past, we must profit by its lessons, and, in order 
to continue what its teachings have procured us, we must 
be mindful of its warnings, and faithfully pursue the line of 
conduct marked out by the framers of the Constitution — 
that Constitution under which, for more than sixty years, 
we have run the glorious race of empire ; dispelling the 
misty doubts of scepticism ; quieting the anxious fears of 
Freedom's friends throughout the universe; terrifying 
the trembling despot on his throne, and awakening the long- 
buried hopes of enthralled millions. And though, through 
the length and breadth of the Christian world, we stand 
towering like some vast column amid the crash and ruin 
of man's prostrate rights, yet soon shall spring from these 
scattered fragments a majestic temple, so wide, so expan- 
sive, that emancipated Christendom, in one congregated 
mass, may repose beneath its roof, never again to bow in 
homage to tyranny until they forget to bend in reverence 
to virtue. As Heaven, step by step, unveils the mysteries 
of finite power to the intellect of man, his own right arm 
will loose the shackles that encumber his body. Pointing 
to our example, the struggling nations repeat, in their own 
tongues, the cheering language of a freeman's sympathy. 
"Where Nature, lonely and lovely, revelled in wild luxuri- 



176 ORATION DELIVERED AT 

ance, they see villages, cities and States, smiling into 
being. Where barbarons tribes roamed with ferocious 
boldness, and tomahawks gleamed over helpless innocence, 
they see a people, bj labor and art adorned, by science 
exalted, by religion sanctified, and by liberty redeemed. 
Kejecting the errors, and yet adopting the advantages of 
other republican systems, they see a Government, more 
perfect in its structure, more efi'ective in its operation, 
more complicated, and yet more simple — more divided, 
and yet more united, than any that has preceded it. 
Obeying a local, and yet acknowledging a national sover- 
eignty ; jealous of State rights, and yet when the national 
weal requires, permitting the encroachments of the Federal 
arm, they see a people whose wrongs are redressed, not 
by marching with death-dealing instruments to slaughter 
the persons of their rulers, but, one by one, peaceably 
depositing at the polls a simple ballot, more efi'ective in 
revolutionizing the policy of their Government, and more 
efficacious in healing their ills, than ten thousand muskets 
directed by the most skilful generals. To the poor, it is a 
weapon of defence against the encroachments of power and 
influence ; and to the rich, a shield from the ultra tendency 
of radical democracy. In a Despotism, man has only to 
obey; in a Republic, he both commands and obeys. 
However ignorant, talent and education receive their 
political reward from his hands ; however humble, power 
lives but on his smile ; high and low, rich and poor, all are 
alike recipients of, and dependent upon, his bounty. 
Wielding with his omnipotent ballot the full portion of his 
sovereignty, he plucks from the crowd whom he will to 
rule over him, and, in turn, commands him who went forth 
to rule to lay down his dignities at the feet of the monarch 
multitude. Since, then, popular sentiment constitutes the 
life-blood of the body politic, how important it is to guard 



BERGEN POINT, N. J, 1V7 

from corrupting influences the veins and arteries of our 
political system. IIow necessary it is to diffuse through 
all its fibres the principles of a pure morality, spiritualizing 
and exalting, rather than debasing and enervating the 
minds of the masses — banishing luxury, encouraging in- 
dustry, exciting patriotic ardor, and, by our example, 
tending to the cultivation of those higher and better 
sympathies of humanity, which can alone give permanency 
to the institutions of a self-ruled people. If, on the other 
hand, longing after the flesh-pots of Egypt, we adopt the 
manners and ape the vices of transatlantic degeneracy, 
woful experience will teach us that our system of govern- 
ment, the best ever devised for the intelligent and good, is 
the very worst to be entrusted to the degraded and 
vicious. That mighty weapon, the power of suff*rage, 
now the grand catholicon for all political diseases, will but 
hasten the speedy dissolution of the once healthy fabric. 
Demagogues will find it easy to delude those who have 
deluded themselves. The liberties of the people will 
finally be buried in the grave of their virtues, and with 
the last dying shriek of departed freedom, shall mingle 
the exulting cries of a despot's minions. 



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